P ENGUIN
CLASSICS
OF M ICE AND M EN
Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, John Steinbeck grew up in a
fertile agricultural valley about twenty-five miles from the Pacific
Coast—and both valley and coast would serve as settings for some
of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where
he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he
left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he
supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City and
then as a caretaker for a Lake Tahoe estate, all the time working on
his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929). After marriage and a move to
Pacific Grove, he published two California fictions, The Pastures
of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on
short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938). Popular
success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935),
stories about M onterey’s paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter
throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three
powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California
laboring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937),
and the book considered by many his finest. The Grapes of Wrath
(1939). Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The
Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine biology
with Sea of Cortez (1941). He devoted his services to the war,
writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette
The Moon Is Down (1942). Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward
Bus (1947), The Pearl (1947), A Russian Journal (1948), another
experimental drama, Burning Bright (1950), and The Log from the
Sea of Cortez (1951) preceded publication of the monumental East
of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own
family’s history. The last decades of his life were spent in New
York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he
traveled widely. Later books include Sweet Thursday (1954), The
Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), Once There Was a
War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with
Charley in Search of America (1962), America and Americans
(1966), and the posthumously published Journal of a Novel: The
East of Eden Letters (1969), Viva Zapata! (1975), The Acts of King
Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), and Working Days: The
Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (1989). He died in 1968, having
won a Nobel Prize in 1962.
SUSAN SHILLINGLAW is a professor of English the director of the
Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University. She coedited Steinbeck and the Environment and John Steinbeck:
Contemporary Reviews. She edits the Steinbeck Newsletter and has
published articles on Steinbeck.
JOHN
STEINBECK
Of Mice
and Men
With an
Introduction by
SUSAN SHILLINGLAW
P ENGUIN BOOKS
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
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First published in the United States of America
by Covici, Friede, Inc. 1937
Published by The Viking Press 1938
Published in a Viking Compass edition 1963
Published in a volume with Cannery Row in Penguin Books 1978
This edition with an introduction by Susan Shillinglaw published in Penguin
Books 1994
Copyright John Steinbeck, 1937
Copyright renewed John Steinbeck, 1965
Introduction copyright © Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA
Inc., 1994
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN P UBLICATION DATA
Steinbeck, John, 1902–1968.
Of mice and men/John Steinbeck; with an introduction by Susan Shillinglaw.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-65980-9
1. Cowboys—California—Salinas River Valley—Fiction. 2. Men—California
—Salinas River Valley—Fiction. 3. Salinas River Valley (Calif.)—Fiction.
4. Friendship—Fiction. I. Title.
[PS3537.T323402 1994]
813’.52—dc20 93–11712
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION BY SUSAN SHILLINGLAW
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
Of Mice and Men
INTRODUCTION
John Steinbeck celebrated friendship, both in his life and in his
fiction. Before he began to write each morning, he frequently
scrawled letters to friends, and these voluminous pages, many
unpublished, map the contours of his life and art. Friendship is the
most enduring relationship in his best work, a fact that places him
solidly in a long tradition of American writers who send male duos
into uncharted terrain. But Steinbeck’s vision of camaraderie is less
markedly an escape from marriage, home, and commitment than an
exploration of the parameters of society and self. “In every bit of
honest writing in the world,” he noted in a 1938 journal entry, “…
there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand
each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well
never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love. There are
shorter means, many of them. There is writing promoting social
change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration of
heroism, but always that base theme. Try to understand each
other.” These words shape his long career, indeed echo in his
acceptance speech for the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Steinbeck’s greatness as a writer lies in his empathy for common
people—their loneliness, joy, anger, and strength, their connection
to places and their craving for land. Of Mice and Men and Cannery
Row, arguably the best of his short novels, owe much of their
appeal to Steinbeck’s ability to orchestrate this thematic
complexity within the context of the abiding commitment between
friends that is love at its highest pitch.
To make that statement is to tread perilously close to the
precipice of sentimentality, a charge critics frequently level against
Steinbeck. Edmund Wilson, for one, declared in a 1940 essay that
the author’s characters were more nearly animal than human, a cry
taken up through the decades. Hostile critics—and Steinbeck’s
novels inevitably drew richly divided responses—asserted that the
emotions his works solicited were excessive and melodramatic,
certainly too intense for his simply drawn characters. However,
the feelings evoked in Steinbeck’s best fiction are controlled by a
tight, objective style, and they are sustained by the author’s
awareness of the genuine loneliness and tragedy of dispossessed
Americans. To read Of Mice and Men as Steinbeck intended is to
keep firmly in mind its original title, “Something That Happened,”
a phrase expressing the non-judgmental acceptance that imprints
his best work of the 1930s and early 40s. In the novel Steinbeck in
effect tells us that this is the way things are; he called his approach
non-teleological thinking, or “is thinking.” The term nonteleological was coined by Steinbeck’s best friend, Edward F.
Ricketts; and as the two men articulated their shared philosophy,
they emphasized the need to see as clearly as a scientist: that is, to
accept life on its own terms. “Is thinking” focused not on ends but
on the process of life, the Aristotelean efficient cause of nature.
When reading Of Mice and Men, we are asked to acknowledge the
inevitability of a situation in which two men, each with a particular
weakness and need, cling to the margins of an unforgiving world. It
is a parable about commitment, loneliness, hope, and loss, drawing
its power from the fact that these universal truths are grounded in
the realistic context of friendship and a shared dream. It is the
energy of that friendship, real but hardly sentimental, that charges
this richly suggestive and emotional text.
Of Mice and Men is the middle book in Steinbeck’s trilogy
about agricultural labor in California. He began the manuscript in
the early months of 1936, shortly after completing his impressive
strike novel, In Dubious Battle, and immediately before beginning
in the fall of 1936 the research that resulted in the M arch 1939
publication of The Grapes of Wrath, his most enduring novel about
the Dust Bowl migrants in California. The flanking texts are, as
suggested by their titles from Paradise Lost and The Battle Hymn
of the Republic, epic responses to the acute problems of farm labor
in California, where large-scale farms had long demanded a
population of itinerant laborers to harvest seasonal crops. The
scope of California’s labor problems seemed to demand such vast
canvases. In the 1930s tensions mounted between the state’s
agribusiness and the underpaid, oppressed, nearly invisible
agricultural laborers. Strikes broke out early in the decade, and
communist labor leaders moved in to organize workers. From 1935
to 1940, exiles from the drought-plagued Southwest poured into
the Golden State, drawn by Americans’ long-held conviction that
the West was the promised land—the place to begin anew—and by
the more concrete expectation of employment in the orange groves
and lettuce fields. M ore than 350,000 Dust Bowl exiles from
Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas came to California in the 1930s,
and the state’s agribusiness simply could not employ all these
refugees, even on the vast tracts of land that produced much of the
nation’s food supply. So from the mid-1930s until 1940 (when
many unemployed workers began finding jobs in the burgeoning
defense industry), the migrants moved restlessly up and down the
state, waiting for crops to ripen, longing for work. The year 1936
was, in fact, about the time that many resident Californians began
waking up to the acute problem on their hands: the steady influx of
white families who were homeless, hungry, poor but proud.
The book that Steinbeck wrote that year, however, is not about
the resistance of California’s landed elite to the economic threat the
newcomers posed, nor is it about the refugees from the Dust Bowl
states who camped beside roads, in overcrowded Hoovervilles, in
filthy camps, scratching out a new beginning. Of Mice and Men is
in one sense an anachronistic text, insisting on its artistry, not its
historicity. Never a true social chronicler, Steinbeck deliberately
de-historicizes each novel of the late 1930s. Although he began In
Dubious Battle with the intention of writing a “biography,” more
or less, of fugitive communists hiding out in nearby Seaside, it
evolved into the troubling saga of the farmers’ intransigence poised
against the labor organizers’ ideological fervor and psychological
dislocation. Ambitious and honest, the novel presents what
Steinbeck called an “unbiased picture” of a strike; and it remains
the preeminent proletarian strike novel of the 1930s. The Grapes
of Wrath, the product of painstaking research (three years of
interviews, trips to California’s Central Valley, and perusal of
government camp reports), is not a realistic novel nor a historical
record of an era. It charts the daily agony of the dispossessed as a
mythic quest for an Edenic land, for a human community.
Although readers continue to strap Steinbeck to the Procrustean
bed of realism, he simply will not fit. Steinbeck ignores, for
example, the ethnic diversity of the laborers as well as the presence
of women labor organizers, even though one resolute young
woman, Caroline Decker, played a key role in strikes of the early
1930s. All three texts are, in fact, far more consciously symbolic
than historic, as Steinbeck fully recognized. Shortly before
beginning The Grapes of Wrath, he voiced his artistic credo in his
journal. The committed writer, he asserted, must not become
ensnared in political ideologies:
Communists are devils who want to steal the little stucco
house of the grocery clerk and rationalize his wife and steal
his children for a state baby factory….Industrialists are fat
greedy, cruel beasts who take pleasure in bombing their
workers. The paralysing process is well along. In Spain the
loyalists are shooting rifles at the figure of Christ, if you are
an insurgent, and the insurgents are shooting babys [sic] if
you are a loyalist. The pressure will come fast now. Some
writers will get caught in the process, will write tellingly in
aid of the process and when it is over they will come back
to consciousness groggy…. Others will stand clear, carrying
on their ancient cry. Try to understand each other. You
can’t hate men if you know them. These latter will be
silenced. This is no recommendation that you follow the
last course. You will do it because that is your craft, that is
what your lives are about.
In Of Mice and Men Steinbeck certainly “stands clear,”
achieving artistic control in part by detaching his story from the
labor unrest of the 1930s and envisioning a less turbulent era when
tramps roved about the state, when work in the vast wheatfields
and groves was plentiful. Only in what Steinbeck called the “tone
to surround the whole,” the “wall of background,” does the text
resonate with a historical moment. From the 1870s until about
1930, California’s wheat and fruit crops were harvested in large
part by itinerant workers, mostly single men for whom roving
became habitual. Some toted blanket rolls or bindles on their backs;
others slept unprotected in the roadside “jungles.” Wages were
low, living quarters squalid, and opportunities for advancement
practically nonexistent. Even the most resolute and ambitious
worker typically met with failure and perforce took to roving. One
study concluded that about twenty-five percent were
feebleminded, forced out on the road. To be a farmworker was to
be among California’s dispossessed, a powerless, degraded, ill-paid
fraternity. “It is the constant craving for human company, for
friends, that is so strong among the floating class,” noted researcher
Frederick C. M ills in a journal kept early in the century. “Denied
wives, or families, or circles of sympathetic friends, this feeling can
only be partially satisfied thru the institution of ‘partners.’ M ost
men hate to travel alone on the road.” The isolated and rootless
existence of the itinerant is the historicity that Steinbeck
represents.
Certainly he would have been familiar with the loneliness of the
working stiff Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, Steinbeck grew
up in one of the richest agricultural valleys in California, where
lettuce, sugar beets, broccoli, and strawberries were (and still are)
harvested in abundance. In high school and college he worked in the
fields and packing plants, listening to the stories and absorbing the
speech of the working man. For nearly two years in the early
1920s, after dropping out of Stanford University, he roved the
California valleys, finding work on ranches owned by Spreckels
Sugar, a company that controlled huge tracts throughout the Salinas
Valley. M any Spreckels workers, like George and Lennie, were
sent from ranch to ranch to help harvest both wheat and sugar
beets (and, like George and Lennie, sought work at employment
agencies similar to M urray and Ready in San Francisco). Indeed,
the episode that inspired Of Mice and Men probably occurred on
one of these ranches. Working as a bindle stiff himself in the early
1920s, Steinbeck saw a huge and troubled man kill a ranch foreman.
“Lennie was a real person,” he told a New York Times reporter in
1937. “He’s in an insane asylum in California right now. I worked
alongside him for many weeks. He didn’t kill a girl. He killed a
ranch foreman. Got sore because the boss had fired his pal and
stuck a pitchfork right through his stomach. I hate to tell you how
many times. I saw him do it. We couldn’t stop him until it was too
late.” It was the kind of episode that Steinbeck filed for later use, a
vivid incident with wide-ranging implications.
He filed it away during the dozen years of his apprenticeship,
from his college years to his midthirties, when he scratched out a
living writing mostly about Californians and their land, ordinary
people whose dreams of secure happy homes in the paradisical
West were often blasted. Although in the early 1930s he published
three novels—Cup of Gold (1929), To a God Unknown (1933),
and Pastures of Heaven (1932)—and wrote his finest short stories,
he did not score his first financial coup until 1935, with Tortilla
Flat. A successful career was thus launched by a collection of wry
tales about M onterey’s paisanos, told in a voice that mimics their
native Spanish. He was thirty-three years old. For the previous
five years, he and his creative, resourceful wife, Carol, had been
living in the Steinbeck family summer home in Pacific Grove, a
seaside community abutting M onterey. In the first half of the
decade, Carol worked sporadically, John wrote, and the two lived
meagerly on her irregular wages and $25.00 per month supplied by
his supportive parents. But with the $4,000 paid him for the film
rights to Tortilla Flat, the Steinbecks for the first time felt free of
financial worry. In the fall of 1935 they traveled to M exico, a
country both had longed to see. A few months later, with In
Dubious Battle a bestseller as well, Carol drew up plans for their
first home, to be constructed in Los Gatos, a village sixty miles
away in the verdant Santa Clara Valley. Of Mice and Men was thus
the first book Steinbeck began with a sense of artistic independence
born of personal security. “M aybe with this security,” he wrote to
his literary agent, Elizabeth Otis, late in 1935, “I can write a better
book. M aybe not. Certainly though I can take a little longer and
write a more careful one.”
Yet whatever his intentions, the book, begun in the small house
in Pacific Grove and completed in the new Los Gatos bungalow,
was not composed in tranquillity. (Indeed, few of Steinbeck’s
works were.) Even when well into the manuscript, his confidence
wavered. “There are problems in it, difficult of resolution,” he
wrote in his journal shortly after moving to the new house. “But
the biggest problem is a resolution of will. The rewards of work are
so sickening to me that I do more with the greatest reluctance. The
mind and will must concentrate again and to a purpose.” It is a
startling confession to be made by a successful writer, as
Steinbeck’s authorized biographer Jackson Benson has noted. Even
when financially secure, Steinbeck wrote out of a kind of liminal
zone: on the one hand confident in his art, secure in his expression;
while on the other doubtful of his abilities, puritanically wrestling
with a sluggish will. Over and over in the journals he kept while
composing his novels, he records his angst, easing the self-doubt,
so it seems, in the very process of writing the revelatory words:
“It is strange how this goes on. The struggle to get started.
Terrible. It always happens….I am afraid. Among other things I
feel that I have put some things over. That the little success of
mine is cheating. I don’t seem to feel that any of it is any good. All
cheating.” And after that cleansing passage, he moves into the text
of Mice, marshaling that entropic will: “I can do anything when my
will is clean and straight. Anything.” For John Steinbeck, who had
determined as a high-school sophomore that he would be a writer
and who had not published his first book until nearly fifteen years
later, writing was a matter of discipline, of goals set and doggedly
achieved. The seemingly effortless prose, so lucid, straightforward,
and suggestive, was mastered through many years of
apprenticeship and months of plain hard work. Writing was
Steinbeck’s passion and his livelihood, but it was also a perpetual
challenge. Indeed, his Promethean efforts to launch each text may
serve as an object lesson for would-be writers: The graceful and
polished prose in Of Mice and Men was written quickly, with great
relish in its artistry, and with few deletions or changes made to the
manuscript (only a fragment of which remains). But Steinbeck,
even with public recognition, also wrote with a considerable degree
of anguished doubt about his own creativity.
So why write this small, tight, backward-looking novel in the
teeth of the Great Depression? The answer has, I believe, two
parts—one formal, one thematic. Throughout his career, he viewed
each book as an experiment, a chance to turn to a new subject or
try his hand at a new form; for Of Mice and Men he created his
own genre, the play/novelette. “The work I am doing now,” he
wrote to his agents in April 1936, “is neither a novel nor a play but
it is a kind of playable novel. Written in novel form but so scened
and set that it can be played as it stands. It wouldn’t be like other
plays since it does not follow the formal acts but uses chapters for
curtains. Descriptions can be used for stage directions…. Plays are
hard to read so this will make both a novel and play as it stands.”
Anticipating the postmodernists, Steinbeck was to declare with
greater and greater frequency in the late 1930s and ‘40s that the
novel was dead, whereas the theater was “waking up,” was fresh
and challenging. Of Mice and Men is thus poised on the cusp of
two genres, one moribund, the other alive. And perhaps
Steinbeck’s intentions are best appreciated with this point in mind.
The play/novelette is his democratic chant, a hybrid that embraces
an elite and popular audience, perhaps as fully an American genre
as Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. As a novel, he believed, the work
was more accessible than a drama, easier to read. Furthermore, as
he noted in a 1938 article written for Stage magazine, the novel
form permitted sophisticated treatment of character and subtle
descriptive passages, the signature of his best fiction. And the
novel allowed for richer tonality, something “vastly important” to
Steinbeck, “a sense of the whole much more complete” than
possible in drama. On the other hand, “in a play, sloppy writing is
impossible.” A play for a 1930s audience demanded a tight focus—
for even tighter times—as he noted in a journal entry that preceded
his first attempt at play writing, the unpublished fragment called
“The Wizard,” drafted in 1932: “We are in a depression. Therefore
my play will have only two main characters, two minor characters,
and two supplementary.” Of Mice and Men is similarly
compressed. To write for the theater was to be acutely aware of
audience, their emotional response to the stage and the experience
of feeling “yourself drawn into the group that was playing.”
Steinbeck’s new genre thus allowed him both to trace fine details of
expression appreciated by a reading audience and to paint an
intensely realized parable for the theatergoer. He could be both
symbolic artist and disciplined craftsman, a writer for the
sophisticated and for the masses. The playable novel—a form he
would often return to during the next ten years (the aborted God in
the Pipes, The Moon Is Down, Burning Bright)—was the “vehicle
exactly adequate to the theme,” he wrote a friend, the ideal genre
for an author who long sought both a tight surface and depth of
meaning, who wrote a taut, accessible prose resonant with meaning
on several “levels,” as he frequently noted of his books.
If the desire to experiment with form drove Steinbeck in a new
direction after In Dubious Battle, the desire to recast the subject of
that long novel was an additional impetus. For him, anxiety of
influence meant wrestling not with other writers’ creativity but
with his own output. Of Mice and Men is a compact and, in its
origin, a highly personal response to the powerlessness of the
California laboring class, the kind of focused study that he often
wrote after long books, as if he needed to take stock, to slow
down, to look closely. As he composed it, he told book dealer Ben
Abramson that the text “hasn’t the weight of I.D.B. It had no
intention of having. Entirely different sort of thing.” It’s a highly
characteristic remark. Steinbeck’s oeuvre has a remarkable range
because he ceaselessly experimented with genres, with subjects,
with techniques. Thus, while the strike novel had been a fully
orchestrated study of working men manipulated both by the
communists who organized them and the farmers who exploited
them, Of Mice and Men registers the intimate lives of the workers
who were the largely nameless victims in the earlier book. It is, as
the last names of the two tramps playfully suggest, M ilton/Small,
a microcosmic response to the epic In Dubious Battle, playing off
the unresolved sociopolitical clashes of the earlier text with an
intimate parable about the psychological disaffection of the
marginalized class. To home in on the working man’s plight,
Steinbeck rewrote the scene that he had witnessed ten years earlier.
What he saw was the clash between a troubled worker and his
boss, between the powerless and the elite. What became the climax
of his fiction was a confrontation between two of the
disenfranchised—Lennie and Curley’s lonely wife—a conflict
whose meaning is less concerned with the cause of oppression,
class conflict, than with the very tenor of that oppression. Of Mice
and Men is a “portrait in ivory” of a highly representative working
class enclave, where the laborers’ own powerlessness results in
social instability. It is a world where personal interaction is marked
by instances of petty control, misunderstanding, jealousy, and
callousness. The political reality Steinbeck examined in Of Mice
and Men, set a “few miles south of Soledad”—Spanish for
“solitude”—is the intense loneliness and anger engendered by
hopelessness.
Indeed, throughout the novel Steinbeck consistently mutes
conflicts between the elite and the powerless, the focus of his
previous text. Gestures of political and social power are diffused or
checked: the posse commitatas’ fury, both at the beginning and the
end; the Boss’s anger at the tardy arrival of Lennie and George;
Curley’s simmering frustration. The opening scene insists on this
narrowing, as Steinbeck introduces his two tramps in a landscape
that conveys both their intimacy with nature and their exclusion
from any real power. Although the richly suggestive first
paragraph takes note of the “strong and rocky Gabilan mountains”
looming above the glade—mountains that throughout the first and
last chapters catch the evening light—our eye is brought to dwell
on the darkening enclosure by the Salinas River, to focus on a pool
where life rises momentarily to the surface, then sinks to the
depths. The novel too spirals into darkness as light repeatedly
fades, as vitality is snuffed. For a moment, before George and
Lennie break through the brush, Steinbeck stops the action,
intensifying this concentration on the circumscribed space. Silences
throughout the text—most notably in the barn after Curley’s wife
is killed—contain the reader within tight places. Although some
critics have objected, with V. F. Calverton, to the “exasperatingly
artificial structure of the plot,” most have recognized that the
dramatic structure demands scenic compression and the message a
circumscribed world. The tight scenes suggest the men’s
entrapment. This narrow, focused, and, as Steinbeck admitted,
“difficult” study allowed him to show that workers destroy
themselves not through external conflicts but through their own
disaffection. The spiral downward that so many wanderers played
out in their own lives is imaginatively recreated in the troubled
interplay among the central characters.
When Steinbeck sent Of Mice and Men off to his agents in the
late summer of 1936, they were disappointed in its narrow scope.
“I’m sorry that you do not find the new book as large in subject as
it should be,” he wrote back. “I probably did not make my subjects
and my symbols clear. The microcosm is rather difficult to handle
and apparently I did not get it over—the earth longings of a Lennie
who was not to represent insanity at all but the inarticulate and
powerful yearning of all men.” If the scope is restricted, the
implications are, as Steinbeck knew, universal. For against the
loneliness of each misfit in the novel—a cripple, a black man, a
woman, the little-man George, and the leonine Lennie (“one of
those whom God has not quite finished,” as Steinbeck describes
the creative imbecile in The Pastures of Heaven)—is the friendship
and dream of Lennie and George. The quality of that uneasy yet
unflinching friendship is the “momentary stay against confusion,”
in the words of Robert Frost, that makes existence in a grim world
meaningful, if only fleetingly so. Their bond is broadly symbolic,
their allegorical potential, observes Peter Lisca, “limited only by
the ingenuity of the [reading] audience.” Within the novel,
however, their symbiotic dependency is hardly understood.
Indeed, the final line is Carlson’s, a man of such myopic vision that
he cannot possibly comprehend the series of events leading to
George and Slim’s final exit: “Now what the hell ya suppose is
eatin’ them two guys?” Like the end of Billy Budd—where Billy’s
remarkable existence is only partially translated into ballad and
journalistic prose—Carlson’s myopia must be supplemented by
the reader’s understanding. “Something That Happened” is
resolved not in what the characters do next, not in an order
imposed on life, but rather in the reader’s comprehension of the
doomed appeal of Lennie and George.
That appeal is shaped both by their friendship and by their
dream. The title that Steinbeck finally selected underscores the
unpredictability of existence as well as its promise, Lennie and
George’s blasted dream to “live off the fatta the lan’.” Taken from
a poem by Robert Burns, the novel’s title suggests the transitory
quality of even “best laid schemes.” The poem tells of an
unfortunate field mouse whose home is flattened by a plow:
But, M ousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft a-gley
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain
For promised joy.
As fully articulated only at the beginning and the end, their dream
is the terse play within the play, with George the polished actor
reciting his lines and Lennie the entranced audience. Each has a role
in the recitation that lends a stately dignity to the two tramps as
well as the book itself. At first it seems an impossible vision that
exists only in the mind, only in the incantatory words that George
repeats to Lennie. But land ownership becomes a real possibility.
Candy has the money, George has selected the site, and the four
eager laborers have divvied up chores. It is perhaps the nearness of
resolution that makes that vision, the text itself, indeed nearly all of
Steinbeck’s books, so universally appealing. “M y earliest
memories,” he wrote to a college friend in 1924, “are of my
mother’s telling me how men could become bright shining creatures
with great white wings and all through the chanting of simple
incantations.” To greater and lesser degrees, residual strains of that
romanticism cut through Steinbeck’s work, particularly in his
apprentice fiction. The story of his early years charts his gradual
ability to use rather than to be controlled by that romantic impulse.
By 1936, in what many critics declare his best novel, Of Mice and
Men, the writer had mastered his craft and had discovered a voice
for his unflinching faith, not in progress, but in human potential.
Covici-Friede published Of Mice and Men on February 25,
1937, priced at $2.00 a copy. A Book-of-the-M onth Club
selection in M arch, it sold briskly (average sales of a thousand
copies a day in the first month), and in company with How to Win
Friends and Influence People and Gone With the Wind it hit
bestseller lists around the country, firmly establishing Steinbeck’s
growing reputation. Critics read the book with almost universal
enthusiasm. Of Mice and Men, wrote Henry Seidel Canby for the
Saturday Review, “should please everybody because it has every
element of good storytelling, and…most of our successful novels
of recent years, with any substance of art to them, have succeeded
by violating most of the canons of the storyteller’s art in order to
emphasize ideology, the stream of consciousness, or behaviorism.”
Steinbeck was lauded as a proletarian writer with a rare “quality of
mercy in depiction of the small man.” It is his “compassion,” noted
Lewis Gannet, “that marks off John Steinbeck, artist, so sharply
from all the little verbal photographers who…snarl in books.” That
summer the “playable novel” was performed as written by the
Theater Union of San Francisco, the production opening to
favorable reviews on M ay 21, 1937, and running for two months.
Steinbeck’s experiment with novel-as-script, however, must be
judged a failure; editing for a powerful New York stage version
proved necessary. When, a few weeks after publication, George
Kaufman showed interest in producing Of Mice and Men on
Broadway, he wrote to Steinbeck suggesting several changes:
Curley’s wife, he noted, “should be drawn more fully….She is the
motivating force of the whole thing and should loom larger. Above
all, it seems to me to be vital that the Curley-Lennie fight be
because of the girl.”
While Kaufman’s suggestion violated the integrity of a highly
naturalistic text in which no one person is responsible for the
outcome, he nonetheless identifies the character who, with Crooks
and Candy, completes the circle of loneliness, a woman whose
unbridled energy finds form in the only role she knows, that of a
sexual tease. (She most definitely is not a “harlot” or, in the words
of Joseph Wood Krutch, a “nymphomaniac”) In the novel
Steinbeck treats her tenderly when she finally tells Lennie “her
story” in a “passion of communication.” As rewritten by Steinbeck
and Kaufman, however, Curley’s wife better articulates the
emptiness feared by nearly every character: “Sure I got a man,” she
tells George in a speech inserted shortly after Candy’s dog is shot.
“He ain’t never home. I got nobody to talk to, I got nobody to be
with. Think I can just set home an’ do nothing but look for Curley?
I want to see somebody. Just see ’em an talk to ’em. There ain’t no
women. I can’t walk to town….” And in the last act Steinbeck
added in manuscript her dream, one as ordinary as Lennie and
George’s:
When this guy was gonna put me in pitchers I thought
about Greeta Garbo. I gotta girl frien wants to be like
Greeta. But Greeta’s always rich. I think I rather be like
Joan Blondell. She’s always poor an she meets this poor
guy an they fall in love….
She, like the others, conveys an unvarnished need for a place and
for the stature bestowed by a role to play. With the exception of
the imperial Slim—a man with status, a man of firm ideas—all seek
a form for lives that are otherwise shapeless.
On stage, wrote John M ason Brown, Steinbeck’s novel
“emerges…as the most poignant statement of human loneliness our
contemporary theatre has produced.” The “supreme virtue of the
story, on the stage as well as in print,” Brooks Atkinson asserted
in a New York Times review, “is the lyric perfection of all these
rude materials.” M ost critics praised the work’s clarity, “heart,”
and unflinching realism. Opening on November 23, 1937, at the
M usic Box Theatre, Kaufman’s Of Mice and Men (with Wallace
Ford as George, Broderick Crawford as Lennie, Claire Luce as
Curley’s wife, and Will Geer as Slim) won the coveted New York
Drama Critics Circle Award for 1937 in relatively short order (“all
save one of the sixteen voting members had saluted ‘Of M ice and
M en’ with a broadside of praise after it opened”). It nudged out
two other widely acclaimed competitors, Thornton Wilder’s Our
Town (which won the Pulitzer for best play) and Clifford Odets’s
Golden Boy. Running for 207 performances, Kaufman’s play, as
much as the novel and the Lewis M ilestone film version released in
1939 (“miraculously intact in mood and spirit,” noted Theatre
Arts), made Steinbeck a household name.
And it helped earn the author and the text a wide-ranging
notoriety. “The first few pages so nauseated me,” wrote the
reviewer for The Catholic World, “that I couldn’t bear to keep it in
my room over night.” The Police Bureau in Providence, Rhode
Island, denied a license to the “lowdown” play in June 1939. In
February 1940, the film was banned in Australia. And in December
of that year, the New York Times reported that at Ft. M cClellan,
Alabama, “chaplains objected to a Christmas Eve screening of
[M ilestone’s] Of Mice and Men, condemning it beforehand as
‘morbid and degenerate,’ and as a result M ajor General Haskell
ordered that the showing be cancelled.” Book, play, and film—
coming in quick succession—disturbed many Americans in part
because they chipped away at the nation’s faith in the incantatory
dream: a new beginning, a tidy home. And in part Steinbeck’s
naturalistic dialogue offended and continues to offend (the novel is
one of the most frequently banned by school boards throughout
the country). The lines, even those delicately censored for the stage
and film, are gritty. Yet Steinbeck adamantly defended his dialogue,
both in Of Mice and Men and, two years later, in The Grapes of
Wrath. “For too long,” Steinbeck wrote his godmother late in 1939,
“the language of books was different from the language of men. To
the men I write about profanity is adornment and ornament and is
never vulgar and I try to write it so.” Tough yet lyrical, realistic
yet symbolic: These words describe both the prose that Steinbeck
perfected in the late 1930s and the artistic vision that produced his
most unsettling trio of novels, In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men,
and The Grapes of Wrath.
The impact of Of Mice and Men, remarkable in the history of
American letters for its success as a book, a play, and a film, is
perhaps best summarized by the citation given by the Drama
Critics Circle Award. The citation reads: “For its direct force and
perception in handling a theme genuinely rooted in American life;
for its bite into the strict quality of its material; for its refusal to
make this study of tragical loneliness and frustration either cheap
or sensational, and finally for its simple, intense and steadily rising
effect on the stage.” These words may well serve as an epigraph to
Steinbeck’s most incisive novella.
I have quoted from unpublished material at the following
institutions: the Long Valley Ledger as well as “The Wizard”
manuscript at San Jose State University’s Steinbeck Research
Center; letters as well as the draft for the play Of Mice and Men at
Rare Books and M anuscripts, Butler Library, Columbia
University; letters from Special Collections, Stanford University;
and the Frederick M ills papers with permission from his son.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Benson, Jackson J. The Short Novels of John Steinbeck: Critical
Essays with a Checklist to Steinbeck Criticism. Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1990.
Benson, Jackson J. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer.
New York: Viking Press, 1984.
Benson, Jackson J., and Anne Loftis. “John Steinbeck and Farm
Labor Unionization: The Backgrounds of In Dubious Battle.”
American Literature 52 (M ay 1980): 194–223.
Emory, Jean M . “M anhood Beset: M isogyny in Of Mice and
Men.” San Jose Studies XVIII (Winter 1992): 33–42.
Goldhurst, William. “Of Mice and Men: John Steinbeck’s Parable
of the Curse of Cain.” Western American Literature 6 (Summer
1971): 123–135. (Reprinted in Benson, Short Novels)
Gurko, Leo. “Of Mice and Men: Steinbeck as M anichean.”
University of Windsor Review 8 (Spring 1973): 11–23.
Lisca, Peter. “Of Mice and Men.” The Wide World of John
Steinbeck, New Brunswick, N.J., 1958: 130–143.
Owens, Louis. “Of Mice and Men: The Dream of Commitment.”
John Steinbeck’s Re-Vision of America. Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1985: 100–106.
Scheer, Ronald. “Of Mice and Men: Novel, Play, M ovie.” The
American Examiner VI (Fall/Winter 1978–79): 6–39.
Spilka, M ark. “Of George and Lennie and Curley’s Wife: Sweet
Violence in Steinbeck’s Eden.” Modern Fiction Studies 20
(Summer 1974): 169–179. (Reprinted in Benson, Short Novels)
Wilson, Edmond. “The Californians: Storm and Steinbeck.” New
Republic 103 (Dec. 9, 1940): 784–787.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
The Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition of Of
Mice and Men is based on the Compass Books edition
issued in 1963 by The Viking Press, Inc.
OF MICE AND MEN
A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to
the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too,
for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight
before reaching the narrow pool. On one side of the river the golden
foothill slopes curve up to the strong and rocky Gabilan
mountains, but on the valley side the water is lined with trees—
willows fresh and green with every spring, carrying in their lower
leaf junctures the debris of the winter’s flooding; and sycamores
with mottled, white, recumbent limbs and branches that arch over
the pool. On the sandy bank under the trees the leaves lie deep and
so crisp that a lizard makes a great skittering if he runs among
them. Rabbits come out of the brush to sit on the sand in the
evening, and the damp flats are covered with the night tracks of
‘coons, and with the spread pads of dogs from the ranches, and
with the split-wedge tracks of deer that come to drink in the dark.
There is a path through the willows and among the sycamores,
a path beaten hard by boys coming down from the ranches to swim
in the deep pool, and beaten hard by tramps who come wearily
down from the highway in the evening to jungle-up near water. In
front of the low horizontal limb of a giant sycamore there is an ash
pile made by many fires; the limb is worn smooth by men who
have sat on it.
Evening of a hot day started the little wind to moving among the
leaves. The shade climbed up the hills toward the top. On the sand
banks the rabbits sat as quietly as little gray, sculptured stones.
And then from the direction of the state highway came the sound
of footsteps on crisp sycamore leaves. The rabbits hurried
noiselessly for cover. A stilted heron labored up into the air and
pounded down river. For a moment the place was lifeless, and then
two men emerged from the path and came into the opening by the
green pool.
They had walked in single file down the path, and even in the
open one stayed behind the other. Both were dressed in denim
trousers and in denim coats with brass buttons. Both wore black,
shapeless hats and both carried tight blanket rolls slung over their
shoulders. The first man was small and quick, dark of face, with
restless eyes and sharp, strong features. Every part of him was
defined: small, strong hands, slender arms, a thin and bony nose.
Behind him walked his opposite, a huge man, shapeless of face,
with large, pale eyes, with wide, sloping shoulders; and he walked
heavily, dragging his feet a little, the way a bear drags his paws.
His arms did not swing at his sides, but hung loosely.
The first man stopped short in the clearing, and the follower
nearly ran over him. He took off his hat and wiped the sweat-band
with his forefinger and snapped the moisture off. His huge
companion dropped his blankets and flung himself down and drank
from the surface of the green pool; drank with long gulps, snorting
into the water like a horse. The small man stepped nervously
beside him.
“Lennie!” he said sharply. “Lennie, for God’ sakes don’t drink
so much.” Lennie continued to snort into the pool. The small man
leaned over and shook him by the shoulder. “Lennie. You gonna be
sick like you was last night.”
Lennie dipped his whole head under, hat and all, and then he
sat up on the bank and his hat dripped down on his blue coat and
ran down his back. “Tha’s good,” he said. “You drink some,
George. You take a good big drink.” He smiled happily.
George unslung his bindle and dropped it gently on the bank. “I
ain’t sure it’s good water,” he said. “Looks kinda scummy.”
Lennie dabbled his big paw in the water and wiggled his fingers
so the water arose in little splashes; rings widened across the pool
to the other side and came back again. Lennie watched them go.
“Look, George. Look what I done.”
George knelt beside the pool and drank from his hand with
quick scoops. “Tastes all right,” he admitted. “Don’t really seem
to be running, though. You never oughta drink water when it ain’t
running, Lennie,” he said hopelessly. “You’d drink out of a gutter
if you was thirsty.” He threw a scoop of water into his face and
rubbed it about with his hand, under his chin and around the back
of his neck. Then he replaced his hat, pushed himself back from the
river, drew up his knees, and embraced them. Lennie, who had been
watching, imitated George exactly. He pushed himself back, drew
up his knees, embraced them, looked over to George to see whether
he had it just right. He pulled his hat down a little more over his
eyes, the way George’s hat was.
George stared morosely at the water. The rims of his eyes were
red with sun glare. He said angrily, “We could just as well of rode
clear to the ranch if that bastard bus driver knew what he was
talkin’ about. ‘Jes’ a little stretch down the highway,’ he says.
‘Jes’ a little stretch.’ God damn near four miles, that’s what it was!
Didn’t wanta stop at the ranch gate, that’s what. Too God damn
lazy to pull up. Wonder he isn’t too damn good to stop in Soledad
at all. Kicks us out and says, ‘Jes’ a little stretch down the road.’ I
bet it was more than four miles. Damn hot day.”
Lennie looked timidly over to him. “George?”
“Yeah, what ya want?”
“Where we goin’, George?”
The little man jerked down the brim of his hat and scowled
over at Lennie. “So you forgot that awready, did you? I gotta tell
you again, do I? Jesus Christ, you’re a crazy bastard!”
“I forgot,” Lennie said softly. “I tried not to forget. Honest to
God I did, George.”
“O.K.—O.K. I’ll tell ya again. I ain’t got nothing to do. M ight
jus’ as well spen’ all my time tellin’ you things and then you forget
’em, and I tell you again.”
“Tried and tried,” said Lennie, “but it didn’t do no good. I
remember about the rabbits, George.”
“The hell with the rabbits. That’s all you ever can remember is
them rabbits. O.K.! Now you listen and this time you got to
remember so we don’t get in no trouble. You remember settin’ in
that gutter on Howard street and watchin’ that blackboard?”
Lennie’s face broke into a delighted smile. “Why sure, George,
I remember that…but…what’d we do then? I remember some girls
come by and you says…you say…”
“The hell with what I says. You remember about us goin’ into
M urray and Ready’s, and they give us work cards and bus
tickets?”
“Oh, sure, George. I remember that now.” His hands went
quickly into his side coat pockets. He said gently, “George…I ain’t
got mine. I musta lost it.” He looked down at the ground in despair.
“You never had none, you crazy bastard. I got both of ’em
here. Think I’d let you carry your own work card?”
Lennie grinned with relief. “I…I thought I put it in my side
pocket.” His hand went into the pocket again.
George looked sharply at him. “What’d you take outta that
pocket?”
“Ain’t a thing in my pocket,” Lennie said cleverly.
“I know there ain’t. You got it in your hand. What you got in
your hand—hidin’ it?”
“I ain’t got nothin’, George. Honest.”
“Come on, give it here.”
Lennie held his closed hand away from George’s direction.
“It’s on’y a mouse, George.”
“A mouse? A live mouse?”
“Uh-uh. Jus’ a dead mouse, George. I didn’ kill it. Honest! I
found it. I found it dead.”
“Give it here!” said George.
“Aw, leave me have it, George.”
“Give it here!”
Lennie’s closed hand slowly obeyed. George took the mouse
and threw it across the pool to the other side, among the brush.
“What you want of a dead mouse, anyways?”
“I could pet it with my thumb while we walked along,” said
Lennie.
“Well, you ain’t petting no mice while you walk with me. You
remember where we’re goin’ now?”
Lennie looked startled and then in embarrassment hid his face
against his knees. “I forgot again.”
“Jesus Christ,” George said resignedly. “Well—look, we’re
gonna work on a ranch like the one we come from up north.”
“Up north?”
“In Weed.”
“Oh, sure. I remember. In Weed.”
“That ranch we’re goin’ to is right down there about a quarter
mile. We’re gonna go in an’ see the boss. Now, look—I’ll give him
the work tickets, but you ain’t gonna say a word. You jus’ stand
there and don’t say nothing. If he finds out what a crazy bastard
you are, we won’t get no job, but if he sees ya work before he
hears ya talk, we’re set. Ya got that?”
“Sure, George. Sure I got it.”
“O.K. Now when we go in to see the boss, what you gonna
do?”
“I…I,” Lennie thought. His face grew tight with thought. “I…
ain’t gonna say nothin’. Jus’ gonna stan’ there.”
“Good boy. That’s swell. You say that over two, three times
so you sure won’t forget it.”
Lennie droned to himself softly, “I ain’t gonna say nothin’…I
ain’t gonna say nothin’…I ain’t gonna say nothin’.”
“O.K.,” said George. “An’ you ain’t gonna do no bad things
like you done in Weed, neither.”
Lennie looked puzzled. “Like I done in Weed?”
“Oh, so ya forgot that too, did ya? Well, I ain’t gonna remind
ya, fear ya do it again.”
A light of understanding broke on Lennie’s face. “They run us
outta Weed,” he exploded triumphantly.
“Run us out, hell,” said George disgustedly. “We run. They
was lookin’ for us, but they didn’t catch us.”
Lennie giggled happily. “I didn’t forget that, you bet.”
George lay back on the sand and crossed his hands under his
head, and Lennie imitated him, raising his head to see whether he
were doing it right. “God, you’re a lot of trouble,” said George. “I
could get along so easy and so nice if I didn’t have you on my tail.
I could live so easy and maybe have a girl.”
For a moment Lennie lay quiet, and then he said hopefully,
“We gonna work on a ranch, George.”
“Awright. You got that. But we’re gonna sleep here because I
got a reason.”
The day was going fast now. Only the tops of the Gabilan
mountains flamed with the light of the sun that had gone from the
valley. A water snake slipped along on the pool, its head held up
like a little periscope. The reeds jerked slightly in the current. Far
off toward the highway a man shouted something, and another man
shouted back. The sycamore limbs rustled under a little wind that
died immediately.
“George—why ain’t we goin’ on to the ranch and get some
supper? They got supper at the ranch.”
George rolled on his side. “No reason at all for you. I like it
here. Tomorra we’re gonna go to work. I seen thrashin’ machines
on the way down. That means we’ll be bucking grain bags, bustin’
a gut. Tonight I’m gonna lay right here and look up. I like it.”
Lennie got up on his knees and looked down at George. “Ain’t
we gonna have no supper?”
“Sure we are, if you gather up some dead willow sticks. I got
three can of beans in my bindle. You get a fire ready. I’ll give you a
match when you get the sticks together. Then we’ll heat the beans
and have supper.”
Lennie said, “I like beans with ketchup.”
“Well, we ain’t got no ketchup. You go get wood. An’ don’t
you fool around. It’ll be dark before long.”
Lennie lumbered to his feet and disappeared in the brush.
George lay where he was and whistled softly to himself. There
were sounds of splashings down the river in the direction Lennie
had taken. George stopped whistling and listened. “Poor bastard,”
he said softly, and then went on whistling again.
In a moment Lennie came crashing back through the brush. He
carried one small willow stick in his hand. George sat up.
“Awright,” he said brusquely. “Gi’me that mouse!”
But Lennie made an elaborate pantomime of innocence. “What
mouse, George? I ain’t got no mouse.”
George held out his hand. “Come on. Give it to me. You ain’t
puttin’ nothing over.”
Lennie hesitated, backed away, looked wildly at the brush line
as though he contemplated running for his freedom. George said
coldly, “You gonna give me that mouse or do I have to sock you?”
“Give you what, George?”
“You know God damn well what. I want that mouse.”
Lennie reluctantly reached into his pocket. His voice broke a
little. “I don’t know why I can’t keep it. It ain’t nobody’s mouse.
I didn’t steal it. I found it lyin’ right beside the road.”
George’s hand remained outstretched imperiously. Slowly, like
a terrier who doesn’t want to bring a ball to its master, Lennie
approached, drew back, approached again. George snapped his
fingers sharply, and at the sound Lennie laid the mouse in his hand.
“I wasn’t doin’ nothing bad with it, George. Jus’ strokin’ it.”
George stood up and threw the mouse as far as he could into
the darkening brush, and then he stepped to the pool and washed
his hands. “You crazy fool. Don’t you think I could see your feet
was wet where you went acrost the river to get it?” He heard
Lennie’s whimpering cry and wheeled about. “Blubberin’ like a
baby! Jesus Christ! A big guy like you.” Lennie’s lip quivered and
tears started in his eyes. “Aw, Lennie!” George put his hand on
Lennie’s shoulder. “I ain’t takin’ it away jus’ for meanness. That
mouse ain’t fresh, Lennie; and besides, you’ve broke it pettin’ it.
You get another mouse that’s fresh and I’ll let you keep it a little
while.”
Lennie sat down on the ground and hung his head dejectedly. “I
don’t know where there is no other mouse. I remember a lady used
to give ’em to me—ever’ one she got. But that lady ain’t here.”
George scoffed. “Lady, huh? Don’t even remember who that
lady was. That was your own Aunt Clara. An’ she stopped givin’
’em to ya. You always killed ’em.”
Lennie looked sadly up at him. “They was so little,” he said,
apologetically. “I’d pet ’em, and pretty soon they bit my fingers
and I pinched their heads a little and then they was dead—because
they was so little.
“I wish’t we’d get the rabbits pretty soon, George. They ain’t
so little.”
“The hell with the rabbits. An’ you ain’t to be trusted with no
live mice. Your Aunt Clara give you a rubber mouse and you
wouldn’t have nothing to do with it.”
“It wasn’t no good to pet,” said Lennie.
The flame of the sunset lifted from the mountaintops and dusk
came into the valley, and a half darkness came in among the
willows and the sycamores. A big carp rose to the surface of the
pool, gulped air and then sank mysteriously into the dark water
again, leaving widening rings on the water. Overhead the leaves
whisked again and little puffs of willow cotton blew down and
landed on the pool’s surface.
“You gonna get that wood?” George demanded. “There’s
plenty right up against the back of that sycamore. Floodwater
wood. Now you get it.”
Lennie went behind the tree and brought out a litter of dried
leaves and twigs. He threw them in a heap on the old ash pile and
went back for more and more. It was almost night now. A dove’s
wings whistled over the water. George walked to the fire pile and
lighted the dry leaves. The flame cracked up among the twigs and
fell to work. George undid his bindle and brought out three cans of
beans. He stood them about the fire, close in against the blaze, but
not quite touching the flame.
“There’s enough beans for four men,” George said.
Lennie watched him from over the fire. He said patiently, “I
like ’em with ketchup.”
“Well, we ain’t got any,” George exploded. “Whatever we ain’t
got, that’s what you want. God a’mighty, if I was alone I could
live so easy. I could go get a job an’ work, an’ no trouble. No mess
at all, and when the end of the month come I could take my fifty
bucks and go into town and get whatever I want. Why, I could stay
in a cat house all night. I could eat any place I want, hotel or any
place, and order any damn thing I could think of. An’ I could do all
that every damn month. Get a gallon of whisky, or set in a pool
room and play cards or shoot pool.” Lennie knelt and looked over
the fire at the angry George. And Lennie’s face was drawn with
terror. “An’ whatta I got,” George went on furiously. “I got you!
You can’t keep a job and you lose me ever’ job I get. Jus’ keep me
shovin’ all over the country all the time. An’ that ain’t the worst.
You get in trouble. You do bad things and I got to get you out.” His
voice rose nearly to a shout. “You crazy son-of-a-bitch. You keep
me in hot water all the time.” He took on the elaborate manner of
little girls when they are mimicking one another. “Jus’ wanted to
feel that girl’s dress—jus’ wanted to pet it like it was a mouse
——Well, how the hell did she know you jus’ wanted to feel her
dress? She jerks back and you hold on like it was a mouse. She
yells and we got to hide in a irrigation ditch all day with guys
lookin’ for us, and we got to sneak out in the dark and get outta the
country. All the time somethin’ like that—all the time. I wisht I
could put you in a cage with about a million mice an’ let you have
fun.” His anger left him suddenly. He looked across the fire at
Lennie’s anguished face, and then he looked ashamedly at the
flames.
It was quite dark now, but the fire lighted the trunks of the
trees and the curving branches overhead. Lennie crawled slowly
and cautiously around the fire until he was close to George. He sat
back on his heels. George turned the bean cans so that another side
faced the fire. He pretended to be unaware of Lennie so close
beside him.
“George,” very softly. No answer. “George!”
“Whatta you want?”
“I was only foolin’, George. I don’t want no ketchup. I
wouldn’t eat no ketchup if it was right here beside me.”
“If it was here, you could have some.”
“But I wouldn’t eat none, George. I’d leave it all for you. You
could cover your beans with it and I wouldn’t touch none of it.”
George still stared morosely at the fire. “When I think of the
swell time I could have without you, I go nuts. I never get no
peace.”
Lennie still knelt. He looked off into the darkness across the
river. “George, you want I should go away and leave you alone?”
“Where the hell could you go?”
“Well, I could. I could go off in the hills there. Some place I’d
find a cave.”
“Yeah? How’d you eat. You ain’t got sense enough to find
nothing to eat.”
“I’d find things, George. I don’t need no nice food with
ketchup. I’d lay out in the sun and nobody’d hurt me. An’ if I
foun’ a mouse, I could keep it. Nobody’d take it away from me.”
George looked quickly and searchingly at him. “I been mean,
ain’t I?”
“If you don’ want me I can go off in the hills an’ find a cave. I
can go away any time.”
“No—look! I was jus’ foolin’, Lennie. ’Cause I want you to
stay with me. Trouble with mice is you always kill ’em.” He
paused. “Tell you what I’ll do, Lennie. First chance I get I’ll give
you a pup. M aybe you wouldn’t kill it. That’d be better than mice.
And you could pet it harder.”
Lennie avoided the bait. He had sensed his advantage. “If you
don’t want me, you only jus’ got to say so, and I’ll go off in those
hills right there—right up in those hills and live by myself. An’ I
won’t get no mice stole from me.”
George said, “I want you to stay with me, Lennie. Jesus
Christ, somebody’d shoot you for a coyote if you was by
yourself. No, you stay with me. Your Aunt Clara wouldn’t like
you running off by yourself, even if she is dead.”
Lennie spoke craftily, “Tell me—like you done before.”
“Tell you what?”
“About the rabbits.”
George snapped, “You ain’t gonna put nothing over on me.”
Lennie pleaded, “Come on, George. Tell me. Please, George.
Like you done before.”
“You get a kick outta that, don’t you? Awright, I’ll tell you,
and then we’ll eat our supper….”
George’s voice became deeper. He repeated his words
rhythmically as though he had said them many times before.
“Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the
world. They got no family. They don’t belong no place. They
come to a ranch an’ work up a stake and then they go inta town
and blow their stake, and the first thing you know they’re
poundin’ their tail on some other ranch. They ain’t got nothing to
look ahead to.”
Lennie was delighted. “That’s it—that’s it. Now tell how it is
with us.”
George went on. “With us it ain’t like that. We got a future. We
got somebody to talk to that gives a damn about us. We don’t have
to sit in no bar room blowin’ in our jack jus’ because we got no
place else to go. If them other guys gets in jail they can rot for all
anybody gives a damn. But not us.”
Lennie broke in. “But not us! An’ why? Because…because I got
you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that’s
why.” He laughed delightedly. “Go on now, George!”
“You got it by heart. You can do it yourself.”
“No, you. I forget some a’ the things. Tell about how it’s
gonna be.”
“O.K. Someday—we’re gonna get the jack together and we’re
gonna have a little house and a couple of acres an’ a cow and some
pigs and——”
“An’ live off the fatta the lan’,” Lennie shouted. “An’ have
rabbits. Go on, George! Tell about what we’re gonna have in the
garden and about the rabbits in the cages and about the rain in the
winter and the stove, and how thick the cream is on the milk like
you can hardly cut it. Tell about that, George.”
“Why’n’t you do it yourself? You know all of it.”
“No…you tell it. It ain’t the same if I tell it. Go on…George.
How I get to tend the rabbits.”
“Well,” said George, “we’ll have a big vegetable patch and a
rabbit hutch and chickens. And when it rains in the winter, we’ll
just say the hell with goin’ to work, and we’ll build up a fire in the
stove and set around it an’ listen to the rain comin’ down on the
roof—Nuts!” He took out his pocket knife. “I ain’t got time for no
more.” He drove his knife through the top of one of the bean cans,
sawed out the top and passed the can to Lennie. Then he opened a
second can. From his side pocket he brought out two spoons and
passed one of them to Lennie.
They sat by the fire and filled their mouths with beans and
chewed mightily. A few beans slipped out of the side of Lennie’s
mouth. George gestured with his spoon. “What you gonna say
tomorrow when the boss asks you questions?”
Lennie stopped chewing and swallowed. His face was
concentrated. “I…I ain’t gonna…say a word.”
“Good boy! That’s fine, Lennie! M aybe you’re gettin’ better.
When we get the coupla acres I can let you tend the rabbits all
right. ‘Specially if you remember as good as that.”
Lennie choked with pride. “I can remember,” he said.
George motioned with his spoon again. “Look, Lennie. I want
you to look around here. You can remember this place, can’t you?
The ranch is about a quarter mile up that way. Just follow the
river?”
“Sure,” said Lennie. “I can remember this. Di’n’t I remember
about not gonna say a word?”
“’Course you did. Well, look. Lennie—if you jus’ happen to
get in trouble like you always done before, I want you to come
right here an’ hide in the brush.”
“Hide in the brush,” said Lennie slowly.
“Hide in the brush till I come for you. Can you remember
that?”
“Sure I can, George. Hide in the brush till you come.”
“But you ain’t gonna get in no trouble, because if you do, I
won’t let you tend the rabbits.” He threw his empty bean can off
into the brush.
“I won’t get in no trouble, George. I ain’t gonna say a word.”
“O.K. Bring your bindle over here by the fire. It’s gonna be
nice sleepin’ here. Lookin’ up, and the leaves. Don’t build up no
more fire. We’ll let her die down.”
They made their beds on the sand, and as the blaze dropped
from the fire the sphere of light grew smaller; the curling branches
disappeared and only a faint glimmer showed where the tree trunks
were. From the darkness Lennie called, “George—you asleep?”
“No. Whatta you want?”
“Let’s have different color rabbits, George.”
“Sure we will,” George said sleepily. “Red and blue and green
rabbits, Lennie. M illions of ’em.”
“Furry ones, George, like I seen in the fair in Sacramento.”
“Sure, furry ones.”
“’Cause I can jus’ as well go away, George, an’ live in a cave.”
“You can jus’ as well go to hell,” said George. “Shut up now.”
The red light dimmed on the coals. Up the hill from the river a
coyote yammered, and a dog answered from the other side of the
stream. The sycamore leaves whispered in a little night breeze.
The bunk house was a long, rectangular building. Inside, the walls
were whitewashed and the floor unpainted. In three walls there
were small, square windows, and in the fourth, a solid door with a
wooden latch. Against the walls were eight bunks, five of them
made up with blankets and the other three showing their burlap
ticking. Over each bunk there was nailed an apple box with the
opening forward so that it made two shelves for the personal
belongings of the occupant of the bunk. And these shelves were
loaded with little articles, soap and talcum powder, razors and
those Western magazines ranch men love to read and scoff at and
secretly believe. And there were medicines on the shelves, and little
vials, combs; and from nails on the box sides, a few neckties. Near
one wall there was a black cast-iron stove, its stovepipe going
straight up through the ceiling. In the middle of the room stood a
big square table littered with playing cards, and around it were
grouped boxes for the players to sit on.
At about ten o’clock in the morning the sun threw a bright
dust-laden bar through one of the side windows, and in and out of
the beam flies shot like rushing stars.
The wooden latch raised. The door opened and a tall, stoopshouldered old man came in. He was dressed in blue jeans and he
carried a big push-broom in his left hand. Behind him came George,
and behind George, Lennie.
“The boss was expectin’ you last night,” the old man said. “He
was sore as hell when you wasn’t here to go out this morning.” He
pointed with his right arm, and out of the sleeve came a round
stick-like wrist, but no hand. “You can have them two beds there,”
he said, indicating two bunks near the stove.
George stepped over and threw his blankets down on the
burlap sack of straw that was a mattress. He looked into his box
shelf and then picked a small yellow can from it. “Say. What the
hell’s this?”
“I don’t know,” said the old man.
“Says ‘positively kills lice, roaches and other scourges.’ What
the hell kind of bed you giving us, anyways. We don’t want no
pants rabbits.”
The old swamper shifted his broom and held it between his
elbow and his side while he held out his hand for the can. He
studied the label carefully. “Tell you what—” he said finally, “last
guy that had this bed was a blacksmith—hell of a nice fella and as
clean a guy as you want to meet. Used to wash his hands even
after he ate.”
“Then how come he got graybacks?” George was working up a
slow anger. Lennie put his bindle on the neighboring bunk and sat
down. He watched George with open mouth.
“Tell you what,” said the old swamper. “This here blacksmith
—name of Whitey—was the kind of guy that would put that stuff
around even if there wasn’t no bugs—just to make sure, see? Tell
you what he used to do—At meals he’d peel his boil’ potatoes, an’
he’d take out ever’ little spot, no matter what kind, before he’d eat
it. And if there was a red splotch on an egg, he’d scrape it off
Finally quit about the food. That’s the kinda guy he was—clean.
Used ta dress up Sundays even when he wasn’t going no place, put
on a necktie even, and then set in the bunk house.”
“I ain’t so sure,” said George skeptically. “What did you say
he quit for?”
The old man put the yellow can in his pocket, and he rubbed
his bristly white whiskers with his knuckles. “Why…he…just
quit, the way a guy will. Says it was the food. Just wanted to
move. Didn’t give no other reason but the food. Just says ‘gimme
my time’ one night, the way any guy would.”
George lifted his tick and looked underneath it. He leaned over
and inspected the sacking closely. Immediately Lennie got up and
did the same with his bed. Finally George seemed satisfied. He
unrolled his bindle and put things on the shelf, his razor and bar of
soap, his comb and bottle of pills, his liniment and leather
wristband. Then he made his bed up neatly with blankets. The old
man said, “I guess the boss’ll be out here in a minute. He was sure
burned when you wasn’t here this morning. Come right in when we
was eatin’ breakfast and says, ‘Where the hell’s them new men?’
An’ he give the stable buck hell, too.”
George patted a wrinkle out of his bed, and sat down. “Give
the stable buck hell?” he asked.
“Sure. Ya see the stable buck’s a nigger.”
“Nigger, huh?”
“Yeah. Nice fella too. Got a crooked back where a horse kicked
him. The boss gives him hell when he’s mad. But the stable buck
don’t give a damn about that. He reads a lot. Got books in his
room.”
“What kind of a guy is the boss?” George asked.
“Well, he’s a pretty nice fella. Gets pretty mad sometimes, but
he’s pretty nice. Tell ya what—know what he done Christmas?
Brang a gallon of whisky right in here and says, ‘Drink hearty
boys. Christmas comes but once a year.’”
“The hell he did! Whole gallon?”
“Yes sir. Jesus, we had fun. They let the nigger come in that
night. Little skinner name of Smitty took after the nigger. Done
pretty good, too. The guys wouldn’t let him use his feet, so the
nigger got him. If he coulda used his feet, Smitty says he woulda
killed the nigger. The guys said on account of the nigger’s got a
crooked back, Smitty can’t use his feet.” He paused in relish of the
memory. “After that the guys went into Soledad and raised hell. I
didn’t go in there. I ain’t got the poop no more.”
Lennie was just finishing making his bed. The wooden latch
raised again and the door opened. A little stocky man stood in the
open doorway. He wore blue jean trousers, a flannel shirt, a black,
unbuttoned vest and a black coat. His thumbs were stuck in his
belt, on each side of a square steel buckle. On his head was a soiled
brown Stetson hat, and he wore high-heeled boots and spurs to
prove he was not a laboring man.
The old swamper looked quickly at him, and then shuffled to
the door rubbing his whiskers with his knuckles as he went. “Them
guys just come,” he said, and shuffled past the boss and out the
door.
The boss stepped into the room with the short, quick steps of
a fat-legged man. “I wrote M urray and Ready I wanted two men
this morning. You got your work slips?” George reached into his
pocket and produced the slips and handed them to the boss. “It
wasn’t M urray and Ready’s fault. Says right here on the slip that
you was to be here for work this morning.”
George looked down at his feet. “Bus driver give us a bum
steer,” he said. “We hadda walk ten miles. Says we was here when
we wasn’t. We couldn’t get no rides in the morning.”
The boss squinted his eyes. “Well, I had to send out the grain
teams short two buckers. Won’t do any good to go out now till
after dinner.” He pulled his time book out of his pocket and
opened it where a pencil was stuck between the leaves. George
scowled meaningfully at Lennie, and Lennie nodded to show that
he understood. The boss licked his pencil. “What’s your name?”
“George M ilton.”
“And what’s yours?”
George said, “His name’s Lennie Small.”
The names were entered in the book. “Le’s see, this is the
twentieth, noon the twentieth.” He closed the book. “Where you
boys been working?”
“Up around Weed,” said George.
“You, too?” to Lennie.
“Yeah, him too,” said George.
The boss pointed a playful finger at Lennie. “He ain’t much of
a talker, is he?”
“No, he ain’t, but he’s sure a hell of a good worker. Strong as a
bull.”
Lennie smiled to himself. “Strong as a bull,” he repeated.
George scowled at him, and Lennie dropped his head in shame
at having forgotten.
The boss said suddenly, “Listen, Small!” Lennie raised his
head. “What can you do?”
In a panic, Lennie looked at George for help. “He can do
anything you tell him,” said George. “He’s a good skinner. He can
rassel grain bags, drive a cultivator. He can do anything. Just give
him a try.”
The boss turned on George. “Then why don’t you let him
answer? What you trying to put over?”
George broke in loudly, “Oh! I ain’t saying he’s bright. He
ain’t. But I say he’s a God damn good worker. He can put up a
four hundred pound bale.”
The boss deliberately put the little book in his pocket. He
hooked his thumbs in his belt and squinted one eye nearly closed.
“Say—what you sellin’?”
“Huh?”
“I said what stake you got in this guy? You takin’ his pay
away from him?”
“No, ’course I ain’t. Why ya think I’m sellin’ him out?”
“Well, I never seen one guy take so much trouble for another
guy. I just like to know what your interest is.”
George said, “He’s my…cousin. I told his old lady I’d take
care of him. He got kicked in the head by a horse when he was a
kid. He’s awright. Just ain’t bright. But he can do anything you tell
him.”
The boss turned half away. “Well, God knows he don’t need
any brains to buck barley bags. But don’t you try to put nothing
over, M ilton. I got my eye on you. Why’d you quit in Weed?”
“Job was done,” said George promptly.
“What kinda job?”
“We…we was diggin’ a cesspool.”
“All right. But don’t try to put nothing over, ’Cause you can’t
get away with nothing. I seen wise guys before. Go on out with the
grain teams after dinner. They’re pickin’ up barley at the threshing
machine. Go out with Slim’s team.”
“Slim?”
“Yeah. Big tall skinner. You’ll see him at dinner.” He turned
abruptly and went to the door, but before he went out he turned
and looked for a long moment at the two men.
When the sound of his footsteps had died away, George turned
on Lennie. “So you wasn’t gonna say a word. You was gonna leave
your big flapper shut and leave me do the talkin’. Damn near lost
us the job.”
Lennie stared hopelessly at his hands. “I forgot, George.”
“Yeah, you forgot. You always forget, an’ I got to talk you out
of it.” He sat down heavily on the bunk. “Now he’s got his eye on
us. Now we got to be careful and not make no slips. You keep
your big flapper shut after this.” He fell morosely silent.
“George.”
“What you want now?”
“I wasn’t kicked in the head with no horse, was I, George?”
“Be a damn good thing if you was,” George said viciously.
“Save ever’body a hell of a lot of trouble.”
“You said I was your cousin, George.”
“Well, that was a lie. An’ I’m damn glad it was. If I was a
relative of yours I’d shoot myself.” He stopped suddenly, stepped
to the open front door and peered out. “Say, what the hell you
doin’ listenin’?”
The old man came slowly into the room. He had his broom in
his hand. And at his heels there walked a dragfooted sheep dog,
gray of muzzle, and with pale, blind old eyes. The dog struggled
lamely to the side of the room and lay down, grunting softly to
himself and licking his grizzled, moth-eaten coat. The swamper
watched him until he was settled. “I wasn’t listenin’. I was jus’
standin’ in the shade a minute scratchin’ my dog. I jus’ now
finished swampin’ out the wash house.”
“You was pokin’ your big ears into our business,” George said.
“I don’t like nobody to get nosey.”
The old man looked uneasily from George to Lennie, and then
back. “I jus’ come there,” he said. “I didn’t hear nothing you guys
was sayin’. I ain’t interested in nothing you was sayin’. A guy on
a ranch don’t never listen nor he don’t ast no questions.”
“Damn right he don’t,” said George, slightly mollified, “not if
he wants to stay workin’ long.” But he was reassured by the
swamper’s defense. “Come on in and set down a minute,” he said.
“That’s a hell of an old dog.”
“Yeah. I had ‘im ever since he was a pup. God, he was a good
sheep dog when he was younger.” He stood his broom against the
wall and he rubbed his white bristled cheek with his knuckles.
“How’d you like the boss?” he asked.
“Pretty good. Seemed awright.”
“He’s a nice fella,” the swamper agreed. “You got to take him
right.”
At that moment a young man came into the bunk house; a thin
young man with a brown face, with brown eyes and a head of
tightly curled hair. He wore a work glove on his left hand, and, like
the boss, he wore high-heeled boots. “Seen my old man?” he asked.
The swamper said, “He was here jus’ a minute ago, Curley.
Went over to the cook house, I think.”
“I’ll try to catch him,” said Curley. His eyes passed over the
new men and he stopped. He glanced coldly at George and then at
Lennie. His arms gradually bent at the elbows and his hands closed
into fists. He stiffened and went into a slight crouch. His glance
was at once calculating and pugnacious. Lennie squirmed under the
look and shifted his feet nervously. Curley stepped gingerly close
to him. “You the new guys the old man was waitin’ for?”
“We just come in,” said George.
“Let the big guy talk.”
Lennie twisted with embarrassment.
George said, “S’pose he don’t want to talk?”
Curley lashed his body around. “By Christ, he’s gotta talk
when he’s spoke to. What the hell are you gettin’ into it for?”
“We travel together,” said George coldly.
“Oh, so it’s that way.”
George was tense, and motionless. “Yeah, it’s that way.”
Lennie was looking helplessly to George for instruction.
“An’ you won’t let the big guy talk, is that it?”
“He can talk if he wants to tell you anything.” He nodded
slightly to Lennie.
“We jus’ come in,” said Lennie softly.
Curley stared levelly at him. “Well, nex’ time you answer when
you’re spoke to.” He turned toward the door and walked out, and
his elbows were still bent out a little.
George watched him out, and then he turned back to the
swamper. “Say, what the hell’s he got on his shoulder? Lennie
didn’t do nothing to him.”
The old man looked cautiously at the door to make sure no one
was listening. “That’s the boss’s son,” he said quietly. “Curley’s
pretty handy. He done quite a bit in the ring. He’s a lightweight,
and he’s handy.”
“Well, let him be handy,” said George. “He don’t have to take
after Lennie. Lennie didn’t do nothing to him. What’s he got
against Lennie?”
The swamper considered….“Well…tell you what. Curley’s
like a lot of little guys. He hates big guys. He’s alla time picking
scraps with big guys. Kind of like he’s mad at ’em because he ain’t
a big guy. You seen little guys like that, ain’t you? Always
scrappy?”
“Sure,” said George. “I seen plenty tough little guys. But this
Curley better not make no mistakes about Lennie. Lennie ain’t
handy, but this Curley punk is gonna get hurt if he messes around
with Lennie.”
“Well, Curley’s pretty handy,” the swamper said skeptically.
“Never did seem right to me. S’pose Curley jumps a big guy an’
licks him. Ever’body says what a game guy Curley is. And s’pose
he does the same thing and gets licked. Then ever’body says the
big guy oughtta pick somebody his own size, and maybe they gang
up on the big guy. Never did seem right to me. Seems like Curley
ain’t givin’ nobody a chance.”
George was watching the door. He said ominously, “Well, he
better watch out for Lennie. Lennie ain’t no fighter, but Lennie’s
strong and quick and Lennie don’t know no rules.” He walked to
the square table and sat down on one of the boxes. He gathered
some of the cards together and shuffled them.
The old man sat down on another box. “Don’t tell Curley I said
none of this. He’d slough me. He just don’t give a damn. Won’t
ever get canned ’Cause his old man’s the boss.”
George cut the cards and began turning them over, looking at
each one and throwing it down on a pile. He said, “This guy
Curley sounds like a son-of-a-bitch to me. I don’t like mean little
guys.”
“Seems to me like he’s worse lately,” said the swamper. “He
got married a couple of weeks ago. Wife lives over in the boss’s
house. Seems like Curley is cockier’n ever since he got married.”
George grunted, “M aybe he’s showin’ off for his wife.”
The swamper warmed to his gossip. “You seen that glove on
his left hand?”
“Yeah. I seen it.”
“Well, that glove’s fulla vaseline.”
“Vaseline? What the hell for?”
“Well, I tell ya what—Curley says he’s keepin’ that hand soft
for his wife.”
George studied the cards absorbedly. “That’s a dirty thing to
tell around,” he said.
The old man was reassured. He had drawn a derogatory
statement from George. He felt safe now, and he spoke more
confidently. “Wait’ll you see Curley’s wife.”
George cut the cards again and put out a solitaire lay, slowly
and deliberately. “Purty?” he asked casually.
“Yeah. Purty…but——”
George studied his cards. “But what?”
“Well—she got the eye.”
“Yeah? M arried two weeks and got the eye? M aybe that’s
why Curley’s pants is full of ants.”
“I seen her give Slim the eye. Slim’s a jerkline skinner. Hell of a
nice fella. Slim don’t need to wear no high-heeled boots on a grain
team. I seen her give Slim the eye. Curley never seen it. An’ I seen
her give Carlson the eye.”
George pretended a lack of interest. “Looks like we was gonna
have fun.”
The swamper stood up from his box. “Know what I think?”
George did not answer. “Well, I think Curley’s married…a tart.”
“He ain’t the first,” said George. “There’s plenty done that.”
The old man moved toward the door, and his ancient dog lifted
his head and peered about, and then got painfully to his feet to
follow. “I gotta be settin’ out the wash basins for the guys. The
teams’ll be in before long. You guys gonna buck barley?”
“Yeah.”
“You won’t tell Curley nothing I said?”
“Hell no.”
“Well, you look her over, mister. You see if she ain’t a tart.”
He stepped out the door into the brilliant sunshine.
George laid down his cards thoughtfully, turned his piles of
three. He built four clubs on his ace pile. The sun square was on
the floor now, and the flies whipped through it like sparks. A
sound of jingling harness and the croak of heavy-laden axles
sounded from outside. From the distance came a clear call. “Stable
Buck—ooh, sta-able Buck!” And then, “Where the hell is that God
damn nigger?”
George stared at his solitaire lay, and then he flounced the cards
together and turned around to Lennie. Lennie was lying down on
the bunk watching him.
“Look, Lennie! This here ain’t no set up. I’m scared. You
gonna have trouble with that Curley guy. I seen that kind before.
He was kinda feelin’ you out. He figures he’s got you scared and
he’s gonna take a sock at you the first chance he gets.”
Lennie’s eyes were frightened. “I don’t want no trouble,” he
said plaintively. “Don’t let him sock me, George.”
George got up and went over to Lennie’s bunk and sat down on
it. “I hate that kinda bastard,” he said. “I seen plenty of ’em. Like
the old guy says, Curley don’t take no chances. He always wins.”
He thought for a moment. “If he tangles with you, Lennie, we’re
gonna get the can. Don’t make no mistake about that. He’s the
boss’s son. Look, Lennie. You try to keep away from him, will
you? Don’t never speak to him. If he comes in here you move clear
to the other side of the room. Will you do that, Lennie?”
“I don’t want no trouble,” Lennie mourned. “I never done
nothing to him.”
“Well, that won’t do you no good if Curley wants to plug
himself up for a fighter. Just don’t have nothing to do with him.
Will you remember?”
“Sure, George. I ain’t gonna say a word.”
The sound of the approaching grain teams was louder, thud of
big hooves on hard ground, drag of brakes and the jingle of trace
chains. M en were calling back and forth from the teams. George,
sitting on the bunk beside Lennie, frowned as he thought. Lennie
asked timidly, “You ain’t mad, George?”
“I ain’t mad at you. I’m mad at this here Curley bastard. I
hoped we was gonna get a little stake together—maybe a hundred
dollars.” His tone grew decisive. “You keep away from Curley,
Lennie.”
“Sure I will, George. I won’t say a word.”
“Don’t let him pull you in—but—if the son-of-a-bitch socks
you—let ‘im have it.”
“Let ’im have what, George?”
“Never mind, never mind. I’ll tell you when. I hate that kind of
a guy. Look, Lennie, if you get in any kind of trouble, you
remember what I told you to do?”
Lennie raised up on his elbow. His face contorted with thought.
Then his eyes moved sadly to George’s face. “If I get in any
trouble, you ain’t gonna let me tend the rabbits.”
“That’s not what I meant. You remember where we slep’ last
night? Down by the river?”
“Yeah. I remember. Oh, sure I remember! I go there an’ hide in
the brush.”
“Hide till I come for you. Don’t let nobody see you. Hide in
the brush by the river. Say that over.”
“Hide in the brush by the river, down in the brush by the
river.”
“If you get in trouble.”
“If I get in trouble.”
A brake screeched outside. A call came, “Stable—Buck. Oh!
Sta-able Buck.”
George said, “Say it over to yourself, Lennie, so you won’t
forget it.”
Both men glanced up, for the rectangle of sunshine in the
doorway was cut off. A girl was standing there looking in. She had
full, rouged lips and wide-spaced eyes, heavily made up. Her
fingernails were red. Her hair hung in little rolled clusters, like
sausages. She wore a cotton house dress and red mules, on the
insteps of which were little bouquets of red ostrich feathers. “I’m
lookin’ for Curley,” she said. Her voice had a nasal, brittle quality.
George looked away from her and then back. “He was in here a
minute ago, but he went.”
“Oh!” She put her hands behind her back and leaned against the
door frame so that her body was thrown forward. “You’re the new
fellas that just come, ain’t ya?”
“Yeah.”
Lennie’s eyes moved down over her body, and though she did
not seem to be looking at Lennie she bridled a little She looked at
her fingernails. “Sometimes Curley’s in here,” she explained.
George said brusquely, “Well he ain’t now.”
“If he ain’t, I guess I better look some place else,” she said
playfully.
Lennie watched her, fascinated. George said, “If I see him, I’ll
pass the word you was looking for him.”
She smiled archly and twitched her body. “Nobody can’t blame
a person for lookin’,” she said. There were footsteps behind her,
going by. She turned her head. “Hi, Slim,” she said.
Slim’s voice came through the door. “Hi, Good-lookin’.”
“I’m tryin’ to find Curley, Slim.”
“Well, you ain’t tryin’ very hard. I seen him goin’ in your
house.”
She was suddenly apprehensive. “’Bye, boys,” she called into
the bunk house, and she hurried away.
George looked around at Lennie. “Jesus, what a tramp,” he
said. “So that’s what Curley picks for a wife.”
“She’s purty,” said Lennie defensively.
“Yeah, and she’s sure hidin’ it. Curley got his work ahead of
him. Bet she’d clear out for twenty bucks.”
Lennie still stared at the doorway where she had been. “Gosh,
she was purty.” He smiled admiringly. George looked quickly
down at him and then he took him by an ear and shook him.
“Listen to me, you crazy bastard,” he said fiercely. “Don’t you
even take a look at that bitch. I don’t care what she says and what
she does. I seen ’em poison before, but I never seen no piece of jail
bait worse than her. You leave her be.”
Lennie tried to disengage his ear. “I never done nothing,
George.”
“No, you never. But when she was standin’ in the doorway
showin’ her legs, you wasn’t lookin’ the other way, neither.”
“I never meant no harm, George. Honest I never.”
“Well, you keep away from her, ’Cause she’s a rattrap if I ever
seen one. You let Curley take the rap. He let himself in for it.
Glove fulla vaseline,” George said disgustedly. “An’ I bet he’s
eatin’ raw eggs and writin’ to the patent medicine houses.”
Lennie cried out suddenly—“I don’ like this place, George.
This ain’t no good place. I wanna get outta here.”
“We gotta keep it till we get a stake. We can’t help it, Lennie.
We’ll get out jus’ as soon as we can. I don’t like it no better than
you do.” He went back to the table and set out a new solitaire
hand. “No, I don’t like it,” he said. “For two bits I’d shove out of
here. If we can get jus’ a few dollars in the poke we’ll shove off
and go up the American River and pan gold. We can make maybe a
couple of dollars a day there, and we might hit a pocket.”
Lennie leaned eagerly toward him. “Le’s go, George. Le’s get
outta here. It’s mean here.”
“We gotta stay,” George said shortly. “Shut up now. The
guys’ll be comin’ in.”
From the washroom nearby came the sound of running water
and rattling basins. George studied the cards. “M aybe we oughtta
wash up,” he said. “But we ain’t done nothing to get dirty.”
A tall man stood in the doorway. He held a crushed Stetson hat
under his arm while he combed his long, black, damp hair straight
back. Like the others he wore blue jeans and a short denim jacket.
When he had finished combing his hair he moved into the room,
and he moved with a majesty only achieved by royalty and master
craftsmen. He was a jerkline skinner, the prince of the ranch,
capable of driving ten, sixteen, even twenty mules with a single line
to the leaders. He was capable of killing a fly on the wheeler’s butt
with a bull whip without touching the mule. There was a gravity in
his manner and a quiet so profound that all talk stopped when he
spoke. His authority was so great that his word was taken on any
subject, be it politics or love. This was Slim, the jerkline skinner.
His hatchet face was ageless. He might have been thirty-five or
fifty. His ear heard more than was said to him, and his slow speech
had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond
thought. His hands, large and lean, were as delicate in their action
as those of a temple dancer.
He smoothed out his crushed hat, creased it in the middle and
put it on. He looked kindly at the two in the bunk house. “It’s
brighter’n a bitch outside,” he said gently. “Can’t hardly see
nothing in here. You the new guys?”
“Just come,” said George.
“Gonna buck barley?”
“That’s what the boss says.”
Slim sat down on a box across the table from George. He
studied the solitaire hand that was upside down to him. “Hope
you get on my team,” he said. His voice was very gentle. “I gotta
pair of punks on my team that don’t know a barley bag from a blue
ball. You guys ever bucked any barley?”
“Hell, yes,” said George. “I ain’t nothing to scream about, but
that big bastard there can put up more grain alone than most pairs
can.”
Lennie, who had been following the conversation back and
forth with his eyes, smiled complacently at the compliment. Slim
looked approvingly at George for having given the compliment. He
leaned over the table and snapped the corner of a loose card. “You
guys travel around together?” His tone was friendly. It invited
confidence without demanding it.
“Sure,” said George. “We kinda look after each other.” He
indicated Lennie with his thumb. “He ain’t bright. Hell of a good
worker, though. Hell of a nice fella, but he ain’t bright. I’ve knew
him for a long time.”
Slim looked through George and beyond him. “Ain’t many
guys travel around together,” he mused. “I don’t know why.
M aybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each
other.”
“It’s a lot nicer to go around with a guy you know,” said
George.
A powerful, big-stomached man came into the bunk house. His
head still dripped water from the scrubbing and dousing. “Hi,
Slim,” he said, and then stopped and stared at George and Lennie.
“These guys jus’ come,” said Slim by way of introduction.
“Glad ta meet ya,” the big man said. “M y name’s Carlson.”
“I’m George M ilton. This here’s Lennie Small.”
“Glad ta meet ya,” Carlson said again. “He ain’t very small.”
He chuckled softly at his joke. “Ain’t small at all,” he repeated.
“M eant to ask you, Slim—how’s your bitch? I seen she wasn’t
under your wagon this morning.”
“She slang her pups last night,” said Slim. “Nine of ’em. I
drowned four of ’em right off. She couldn’t feed that many.”
“Got five left, huh?”
“Yeah, five. I kept the biggest.”
“What kinda dogs you think they’re gonna be?”
“I dunno,” said Slim. “Some kinda shepherds, I guess. That’s
the most kind I seen around here when she was in heat.”
Carlson went on, “Got five pups, huh. Gonna keep all of ’em?”
“I dunno. Have to keep ’em a while so they can drink Lulu’s
milk.”
Carlson said thoughtfully, “Well, looka here, Slim. I been
thinkin’. That dog of Candy’s is so God damn old he can’t hardly
walk. Stinks like hell, too. Ever’ time he comes into the bunk house
I can smell him for two, three days. Why’n’t you get Candy to
shoot his old dog and give him one of the pups to raise up? I can
smell that dog a mile away. Got no teeth, damn near blind, can’t
eat. Candy feeds him milk. He can’t chew nothing else.”
George had been staring intently at Slim. Suddenly a triangle
began to ring outside, slowly at first, and then faster and faster
until the beat of it disappeared into one ringing sound. It stopped
as suddenly as it had started.
“There she goes,” said Carlson.
Outside, there was a burst of voices as a group of men went
by.
Slim stood up slowly and with dignity. “You guys better come
on while they’s still something to eat. Won’t be nothing left in a
couple of minutes.”
Carlson stepped back to let Slim precede him, and then the two
of them went out the door.
Lennie was watching George excitedly. George rumpled his
cards into a messy pile. “Yeah!” George said, “I heard him, Lennie.
I’ll ask him.”
“A brown and white one,” Lennie cried excitedly.
“Come on. Le’s get dinner. I don’t know whether he got a
brown and white one.”
Lennie didn’t move from his bunk. “You ask him right away,
George, so he won’t kill no more of ’em.”
“Sure. Come on now, get up on your feet.”
Lennie rolled off his bunk and stood up, and the two of them
started for the door. Just as they reached it, Curley bounced in.
“You seen a girl around here?” he demanded angrily.
George said coldly. “’Bout half an hour ago maybe.”
“Well what the hell was she doin’?”
George stood still, watching the angry little man. He said
insultingly, “She said—she was lookin’ for you.”
Curley seemed really to see George for the first time. His eyes
flashed over George, took in his height, measured his reach, looked
at his trim middle. “Well, which way’d she go?” he demanded at
last.
“I dunno,” said George. “I didn’t watch her go.”
Curley scowled at him, and turning, hurried out the door.
George said, “Ya know, Lennie, I’m scared I’m gonna tangle
with that bastard myself. I hate his guts. Jesus Christ! Come on.
They won’t be a damn thing left to eat.”
They went out the door. The sunshine lay in a thin line under
the window. From a distance there could be heard a rattle of dishes.
After a moment the ancient dog walked lamely in through the
open door. He gazed about with mild, half-blind eyes. He sniffed,
and then lay down and put his head between his paws. Curley
popped into the doorway again and stood looking into the room.
The dog raised his head, but when Curley jerked out, the grizzled
head sank to the floor again.
Although there was evening brightness showing through the
windows of the bunk house, inside it was dusk. Through the open
door came the thuds and occasional clangs of a horseshoe game, and
now and then the sound of voices raised in approval or derision.
Slim and George came into the darkening bunk house together.
Slim reached up over the card table and turned on the tin-shaded
electric light. Instantly the table was brilliant with light, and the
cone of the shade threw its brightness straight downward, leaving
the corners of the bunk house still in dusk. Slim sat down on a box
and George took his place opposite.
“It wasn’t nothing,” said Slim. “I would of had to drowned
most of ’em anyways. No need to thank me about that.”
George said, “It wasn’t much to you, maybe, but it was a hell
of a lot to him. Jesus Christ, I don’t know how we’re gonna get
him to sleep in here. He’ll want to sleep right out in the barn with
’em. We’ll have trouble keepin’ him from getting right in the box
with them pups.”
“It wasn’t nothing,” Slim repeated. “Say, you sure was right
about him. M aybe he ain’t bright, but I never seen such a worker.
He damn near killed his partner buckin’ barley. There ain’t nobody
can keep up with him. God awmighty I never seen such a strong
guy.”
George spoke proudly. “Jus’ tell Lennie what to do an’ he’ll do
it if it don’t take no figuring. He can’t think of nothing to do
himself, but he sure can take orders.”
There was a clang of horseshoe on iron stake outside and a little
cheer of voices.
Slim moved back slightly so the light was not on his face.
“Funny how you an’ him string along together.” It was Slim’s calm
invitation to confidence.
“What’s funny about it?” George demanded defensively.
“Oh, I dunno. Hardly none of the guys ever travel together. I
hardly never seen two guys travel together. You know how the
hands are, they just come in and get their bunk and work a month,
and then they quit and go out alone. Never seem to give a damn
about nobody. It jus’ seems kinda funny a cuckoo like him and a
smart little guy like you travelin’ together.”
“He ain’t no cuckoo,” said George. “He’s dumb as hell, but he
ain’t crazy. An’ I ain’t so bright neither, or I wouldn’t be buckin’
barley for my fifty and found. If I was bright, if I was even a little
bit smart, I’d have my own little place, an’ I’d be bringin’ in my
own crops, ‘stead of doin’ all the work and not getting what comes
up outta the ground.” George fell silent. He wanted to talk. Slim
neither encouraged nor discouraged him. He just sat back quiet and
receptive.
“It ain’t so funny, him an’ me goin’ aroun’ together,” George
said at last. “Him and me was both born in Auburn. I knowed his
Aunt Clara. She took him when he was a baby and raised him up.
When his Aunt Clara died, Lennie just come along with me out
workin’. Got kinda used to each other after a little while.”
“Umm,” said Slim.
George looked over at Slim and saw the calm, Godlike eyes
fastened on him. “Funny,” said George. “I used to have a hell of a
lot of fun with ‘im. Used to play jokes on ‘im ’Cause he was too
dumb to take care of ‘imself. But he was too dumb even to know
he had a joke played on him. I had fun. M ade me seem God damn
smart alongside of him. Why he’d do any damn thing I tol’ him. If I
tol’ him to walk over a cliff, over he’d go. That wasn’t so damn
much fun after a while. He never got mad about it, neither. I’ve
beat the hell outta him, and he coulda bust every bone in my body
jus’ with his han’s, but he never lifted a finger against me.”
George’s voice was taking on the tone of confession. “Tell you
what made me stop that. One day a bunch of guys was standin’
around up on the Sacramento River. I was feelin’ pretty smart. I
turns to Lennie and says, ‘Jump in.’ An’ he jumps. Couldn’t swim
a stroke. He damn near drowned before we could get him. An’ he
was so damn nice to me for pullin’ him out. Clean forgot I told him
to jump in. Well, I ain’t done nothing like that no more.”
“He’s a nice fella,” said Slim. “Guy don’t need no sense to be a
nice fella. Seems to me sometimes it jus’ works the other way
around. Take a real smart guy and he ain’t hardly ever a nice fella.”
George stacked the scattered cards and began to lay out his
solitaire hand. The shoes thudded on the ground outside. At the
windows the light of the evening still made the window squares
bright.
“I ain’t got no people,” George said. “I seen the guys that go
around on the ranches alone. That ain’t no good. They don’t have
no fun. After a long time they get mean. They get wantin’ to fight
all the time.”
“Yeah, they get mean,” Slim agreed. “They get so they don’t
want to talk to nobody.”
“’Course Lennie’s a God damn nuisance most of the time,” said
George. “But you get used to goin’ around with a guy an’ you
can’t get rid of him.”
“He ain’t mean,” said Slim. “I can see Lennie ain’t a bit mean.”
“’Course he ain’t mean. But he gets in trouble alla time because
he’s so God damn dumb. Like what happened in Weed—” He
stopped, stopped in the middle of turning over a card. He looked
alarmed and peered over at Slim. “You wouldn’t tell nobody?”
“What’d he do in Weed?” Slim asked calmly.
“You wouldn’ tell?…No, ’course you wouldn’.”
“What’d he do in Weed?” Slim asked again.
“Well, he seen this girl in a red dress. Dumb bastard like he is,
he wants to touch ever’thing he likes. Just wants to feel it. So he
reaches out to feel this red dress an’ the girl lets out a squawk, and
that gets Lennie all mixed up, and he holds on ’Cause that’s the
only thing he can think to do. Well, this girl squawks and squawks.
I was jus’ a little bit off, and I heard all the yellin’, so I comes
running, an’ by that time Lennie’s so scared all he can think to do
is jus’ hold on. I socked him over the head with a fence picket to
make him let go. He was so scairt he couldn’t let go of that dress.
And he’s so God damn strong, you know.”
Slim’s eyes were level and unwinking. He nodded very slowly.
“So what happens?”
George carefully built his line of solitaire cards. “Well, that girl
rabbits in an’ tells the law she been raped. The guys in Weed start
a party out to lynch Lennie. So we sit in a irrigation ditch under
water all the rest of that day. Got on’y our heads sticking out from
the side of the ditch. An’ that night we scrammed outta there.”
Slim sat in silence for a moment. “Didn’t hurt the girl none,
huh?” he asked finally.
“Hell, no. He just scared her. I’d be scared too if he grabbed
me. But he never hurt her. He jus’ wanted to touch that red dress,
like he wants to pet them pups all the time.”
“He ain’t mean,” said Slim. “I can tell a mean guy a mile off.”
“’Course he ain’t, and he’ll do any damn thing I——”
Lennie came in through the door. He wore his blue denim coat
over his shoulders like a cape, and he walked hunched way over.
“Hi, Lennie,” said George. “How do you like the pup now?”
Lennie said breathlessly, “He’s brown an’ white jus’ like I
wanted.” He went directly to his bunk and lay down and turned his
face to the wall and drew up his knees.
George put down his cards very deliberately. “Lennie,” he said
sharply.
Lennie twisted his neck and looked over his shoulder. “Huh?
What you want, George?”
“I tol’ you you couldn’t bring that pup in here.”
“What pup, George? I ain’t got no pup.”
George went quickly to him, grabbed him by the shoulder and
rolled him over. He reached down and picked the tiny puppy from
where Lennie had been concealing it against his stomach.
Lennie sat up quickly. “Give ‘um to me, George.”
George said, “You get right up an’ take this pup back to the
nest. He’s gotta sleep with his mother. You want to kill him? Just
born last night an’ you take him out of the nest. You take him back
or I’ll tell Slim not to let you have him.”
Lennie held out his hands pleadingly. “Give ‘um to me, George.
I’ll take ‘um back. I didn’t mean no harm, George. Honest I didn’t.
I jus’ wanted to pet ‘um a little.”
George handed the pup to him. “Awright. You get him back
there quick, and don’ you take him out no more. You’ll kill him,
the first thing you know.” Lennie fairly scuttled out of the room.
Slim had not moved. His calm eyes followed Lennie out the
door. “Jesus,” he said. “He’s jes’ like a kid, ain’t he.”
“Sure he’s jes’ like a kid. There ain’t no more harm in him than
a kid neither, except he’s so strong. I bet he won’t come in here to
sleep tonight. He’d sleep right alongside that box in the barn. Well
—let ‘im. He ain’t doin’ no harm out there.”
It was almost dark outside now. Old Candy, the swamper,
came in and went to his bunk, and behind him struggled his old dog.
“Hello, Slim. Hello, George. Didn’t neither of you play
horseshoes?”
“I don’t like to play ever’ night,” said Slim.
Candy went on, “Either you guys got a slug of whisky? I gotta
gut ache.”
“I ain’t,” said Slim. “I’d drink it myself if I had, an’ I ain’t got a
gut ache neither.”
“Gotta bad gut ache,” said Candy. “Them God damn turnips
give it to me. I knowed they was going to before I ever eat ’em.”
The thick-bodied Carlson came in out of the darkening yard. He
walked to the other end of the bunk house and turned on the
second shaded light. “Darker’n hell in here,” he said. “Jesus, how
that nigger can pitch shoes.”
“He’s plenty good,” said Slim.
“Damn right he is,” said Carlson. “He don’t give nobody else a
chance to win——” He stopped and sniffed the air, and still
sniffing, looked down at the old dog. “God awmighty, that dog
stinks. Get him outta here, Candy! I don’t know nothing that
stinks as bad as an old dog. You gotta get him out.”
Candy rolled to the edge of his bunk. He reached over and
patted the ancient dog, and he apologized, “I been around him so
much I never notice how he stinks.”
“Well, I can’t stand him in here,” said Carlson. “That stink
hangs around even after he’s gone.” He walked over with his
heavy-legged stride and looked down at the dog. “Got no teeth,” he
said. “He’s all stiff with rheumatism. He ain’t no good to you,
Candy. An’ he ain’t no good to himself. Why’n’t you shoot him,
Candy?”
The old man squirmed uncomfortably. “Well—hell! I had him
so long. Had him since he was a pup. I herded sheep with him.” He
said proudly, “You wouldn’t think it to look at him now, but he
was the best damn sheep dog I ever seen.”
George said, “I seen a guy in Weed that had an Airedale could
herd sheep. Learned it from the other dogs.”
Carlson was not to be put off. “Look, Candy. This of dog jus’
suffers hisself all the time. If you was to take him out and shoot
him right in the back of the head—” he leaned over and pointed,
“—right there, why he’d never know what hit him.”
Candy looked about unhappily. “No,” he said softly. “No, I
couldn’ do that. I had ‘im too long.”
“He don’t have no fun,” Carlson insisted. “And he stinks to
beat hell. Tell you what. I’ll shoot him for you. Then it won’t be
you that does it.”
Candy threw his legs off his bunk. He scratched the white
stubble whiskers on his cheek nervously. “I’m so used to him,” he
said softly. “I had him from a pup.”
“Well, you ain’t bein’ kind to him keepin’ him alive,” said
Carlson. “Look, Slim’s bitch got a litter right now. I bet Slim would
give you one of them pups to raise up, wouldn’t you, Slim?”
The skinner had been studying the old dog with his calm eyes.
“Yeah,” he said. “You can have a pup if you want to.” He seemed
to shake himself free for speech. “Carl’s right, Candy. That dog
ain’t no good to himself. I wisht somebody’d shoot me if I got old
an’ a cripple.”
Candy looked helplessly at him, for Slim’s opinions were law.
“M aybe it’d hurt him,” he suggested. “I don’t mind takin’ care of
him.”
Carlson said, “The way I’d shoot him, he wouldn’t feel
nothing. I’d put the gun right there.” He pointed with his toe.
“Right back of the head. He wouldn’t even quiver.”
Candy looked for help from face to face. It was quite dark
outside by now. A young laboring man came in. His sloping
shoulders were bent forward and he walked heavily on his heels, as
though he carried the invisible grain bag. He went to his bunk and
put his hat on his shelf. Then he picked a pulp magazine from his
shelf and brought it to the light over the table. “Did I show you
this, Slim?” he asked.
“Show me what?”
The young man turned to the back of the magazine, put it
down on the table and pointed with his finger. “Right there, read
that.” Slim bent over it. “Go on,” said the young man. “Read it out
loud.”
“‘Dear Editor:’” Slim read slowly. “‘I read your mag for six
years and I think it is the best on the market. I like stories by Peter
Rand. I think he is a whing-ding. Give us more like the Dark Rider.
I don’t write many letters. Just thought I would tell you I think
your mag is the best dime’s worth I ever spent.’”
Slim looked up questioningly. “What you want me to read that
for?”
Whit said, “Go on. Read the name at the bottom.”
Slim read, “‘Yours for success, William Tenner.’” He glanced
up at Whit again. “What you want me to read that for?”
Whit closed the magazine impressively. “Don’t you remember
Bill Tenner? Worked here about three months ago?”
Slim thought….“Little guy?” he asked. “Drove a cultivator?”
“That’s him,” Whit cried. “That’s the guy!”
“You think he’s the guy wrote this letter?”
“I know it. Bill and me was in here one day. Bill had one of
them books that just come. He was lookin’ in it and he says, ‘I
wrote a letter. Wonder if they put it in the book!’ But it wasn’t
there. Bill says, ‘M aybe they’re savin’ it for later.’ An’ that’s just
what they done. There it is.”
“Guess you’re right,” said Slim. “Got it right in the book.”
George held out his hand for the magazine. “Let’s look at it?”
Whit found the place again, but he did not surrender his hold on
it. He pointed out the letter with his forefinger. And then he went
to his box shelf and laid the magazine carefully in. “I wonder if Bill
seen it,” he said. “Bill and me worked in that patch of field peas.
Run cultivators, both of us. Bill was a hell of a nice fella.”
During the conversation Carlson had refused to be drawn in. He
continued to look down at the old dog. Candy watched him
uneasily. At last Carlson said, “If you want me to, I’ll put the old
devil out of his misery right now and get it over with. Ain’t
nothing left for him. Can’t eat, can’t see, can’t even walk without
hurtin’.”
Candy said hopefully, “You ain’t got no gun.”
“The hell I ain’t. Got a Luger. It won’t hurt him none at all.”
Candy said, “M aybe tomorra. Le’s wait till tomorra.”
“I don’t see no reason for it,” said Carlson. He went to his
bunk, pulled his bag from underneath it and took out a Luger
pistol. “Let’s get it over with,” he said. “We can’t sleep with him
stinkin’ around in here.” He put the pistol in his hip pocket.
Candy looked a long time at Slim to try to find some reversal.
And Slim gave him none. At last Candy said softly and hopelessly,
“Awright—take ‘im.” He did not look down at the dog at all. He
lay back on his bunk and crossed his arms behind his head and
stared at the ceiling.
From his pocket Carlson took a little leather thong. He stooped
over and tied it around the old dog’s neck. All the men except
Candy watched him. “Come boy. Come on, boy,” he said gently.
And he said apologetically to Candy, “He won’t even feel it.”
Candy did not move nor answer him. He twitched the thong.
“Come on, boy.” The old dog got slowly and stiffly to his feet and
followed the gently pulling leash.
Slim said, “Carlson.”
“Yeah?”
“You know what to do.”
“What ya mean, Slim?”
“Take a shovel,” said Slim shortly.
“Oh, sure! I get you.” He led the dog out into the darkness.
George followed to the door and shut the door and set the latch
gently in its place. Candy lay rigidly on his bed staring at the
ceiling.
Slim said loudly, “One of my lead mules got a bad hoof. Got to
get some tar on it.” His voice trailed off. It was silent outside.
Carlson’s footsteps died away. The silence came into the room.
And the silence lasted.
George chuckled, “I bet Lennie’s right out there in the barn
with his pup. He won’t want to come in here no more now he’s
got a pup.”
Slim said, “Candy, you can have any one of them pups you
want.”
Candy did not answer. The silence fell on the room again. It
came out of the night and invaded the room. George said,
“Anybody like to play a little euchre?”
“I’ll play out a few with you,” said Whit.
They took places opposite each other at the table under the
light, but George did not shuffle the cards. He rippled the edge of
the deck nervously, and the little snapping noise drew the eyes of
all the men in the room, so that he stopped doing it. The silence fell
on the room again. A minute passed, and another minute. Candy
lay still, staring at the ceiling. Slim gazed at him for a moment and
then looked down at his hands; he subdued one hand with the
other, and held it down. There came a little gnawing sound from
under the floor and all the men looked down toward it gratefully.
Only Candy continued to stare at the ceiling.
“Sounds like there was a rat under there,” said George. “We
ought to get a trap down there.”
Whit broke out, “What the hell’s takin’ him so long? Lay out
some cards, why don’t you? We ain’t going to get no euchre
played this way.”
George brought the cards together tightly and studied the backs
of them. The silence was in the room again.
A shot sounded in the distance. The men looked quickly at the
old man. Every head turned toward him.
For a moment he continued to stare at the ceiling. Then he
rolled slowly over and faced the wall and lay silent.
George shuffled the cards noisily and dealt them. Whit drew a
scoring board to him and set the pegs to start. Whit said, “I guess
you guys really come here to work.”
“How do ya mean?” George asked.
Whit laughed. “Well, ya come on a Friday. You got two days
to work till Sunday.”
“I don’t see how you figure,” said George.
Whit laughed again. “You do if you been around these big
ranches much. Guy that wants to look over a ranch comes in
Sat’day afternoon. He gets Sat’day night supper an’ three meals on
Sunday, and he can quit M onday mornin’ after breakfast without
turning his hand. But you come to work Friday noon. You got to
put in a day an’ a half no matter how you figure.”
George looked at him levelly. “We’re gonna stick aroun’ a
while,” he said. “M e an’ Lennie’s gonna roll up a stake.”
The door opened quietly and the stable buck put in his head; a
lean negro head, lined with pain, the eyes patient. “M r. Slim.”
Slim took his eyes from old Candy. “Huh? Oh! Hello, Crooks.
What’s’a matter?”
“You told me to warm up tar for that mule’s foot. I got it
warm.”
“Oh! Sure, Crooks. I’ll come right out an’ put it on.”
“I can do it if you want, M r. Slim.”
“No. I’ll come do it myself.” He stood up.
Crooks said, “M r. Slim.”
“Yeah.”
“That big new guy’s messin’ around your pups out in the
barn.”
“Well, he ain’t doin’ no harm. I give him one of them pups.”
“Just thought I’d tell ya,” said Crooks. “He’s takin’ ’em outta
the nest and handlin’ them. That won’t do them no good.”
“He won’t hurt ’em,” said Slim. “I’ll come along with you
now.”
George looked up. “If that crazy bastard’s foolin’ around too
much, jus’ kick him out, Slim.”
Slim followed the stable buck out of the room.
George dealt and Whit picked up his cards and examined them.
“Seen the new kid yet?” he asked.
“What kid?” George asked.
“Why, Curley’s new wife.”
“Yeah, I seen her.”
“Well, ain’t she a looloo?”
“I ain’t seen that much of her,” said George.
Whit laid down his cards impressively. “Well, stick around an’
keep your eyes open. You’ll see plenty. She ain’t concealin’
nothing. I never seen nobody like her. She got the eye goin’ all the
time on everybody. I bet she even gives the stable buck the eye. I
don’t know what the hell she wants.”
George asked casually, “Been any trouble since she got here?”
It was obvious that Whit was not interested in his cards. He
laid his hand down and George scooped it in. George laid out his
deliberate solitaire hand—seven cards, and six on top, and five on
top of those.
Whit said, “I see what you mean. No, they ain’t been nothing
yet. Curley’s got yella-jackets in his drawers, but that’s all so far.
Ever’ time the guys is around she shows up. She’s lookin’ for
Curley, or she thought she lef’ somethin’ layin’ around and she’s
lookin’ for it. Seems like she can’t keep away from guys. An’
Curley’s pants is just crawlin’ with ants, but they ain’t nothing
come of it yet.”
George said, “She’s gonna make a mess. They’s gonna be a bad
mess about her. She’s a jail bait all set on the trigger. That Curley
got his work cut out for him. Ranch with a bunch of guys on it
ain’t no place for a girl, specially like her.”
Whit said, “If you got idears, you ought ta come in town with
us guys tomorra night.”
“Why? What’s doin’?”
“Jus’ the usual thing. We go in to old Susy’s place. Hell of a
nice place. Old Susy’s a laugh—always crackin’ jokes. Like she
says when we come up on the front porch las’ Sat’day night. Susy
opens the door and then she yells over her shoulder, ‘Get yor coats
on, girls, here comes the sheriff.’ She never talks dirty, neither. Got
five girls there.”
“What’s it set you back?” George asked.
“Two an’ a half. You can get a shot for two bits. Susy got nice
chairs to set in, too. If a guy don’t want a flop, why he can just set
in the chairs and have a couple or three shots and pass the time of
day and Susy don’t give a damn. She ain’t rushin’ guys through
and kickin’ ’em out if they don’t want a flop.”
“M ight go in and look the joint over,” said George.
“Sure. Come along. It’s a hell of a lot of fun—her crackin’ jokes
all the time. Like she says one time, she says, ‘I’ve knew people
that if they got a rag rug on the floor an’ a kewpie doll lamp on the
phonograph they think they’re running a parlor house.’ That’s
Clara’s house she’s talkin’ about. An’ Susy says, ‘I know what
you boys want,’ she says. ‘M y girls is clean,’ she says, ‘an’ there
ain’t no water in my whisky,’ she says. ‘If any you guys wanta
look at a kewpie doll lamp an’ take your own chance gettin’
burned, why you know where to go.’ An’ she says, ‘There’s guys
around here walkin’ bow-legged ’Cause they like to look at a
kewpie doll lamp.’”
George asked, “Clara runs the other house, huh?”
“Yeah,” said Whit. “We don’t never go there. Clara gets three
bucks a crack and thirty-five cents a shot, and she don’t crack no
jokes. But Susy’s place is clean and she got nice chairs. Don’t let
no goo-goos in, neither.”
“M e an’ Lennie’s rollin’ up a stake,” said George. “I might go
in an’ set and have a shot, but I ain’t puttin’ out no two and a
half.”
“Well, a guy got to have some fun sometime,” said Whit.
The door opened and Lennie and Carlson came in together.
Lennie crept to his bunk and sat down, trying not to attract
attention. Carlson reached under his bunk and brought out his bag.
He didn’t look at old Candy, who still faced the wall. Carlson
found a little cleaning rod in the bag and a can of oil. He laid them
on his bed and then brought out the pistol, took out the magazine
and snapped the loaded shell from the chamber. Then he fell to
cleaning the barrel with the little rod. When the ejector snapped,
Candy turned over and looked for a moment at the gun before he
turned back to the wall again.
Carlson said casually, “Curley been in yet?”
“No,” said Whit. “What’s eatin’ on Curley?”
Carlson squinted down the barrel of his gun. “Lookin’ for his
old lady. I seen him going round and round outside.”
Whit said sarcastically, “He spends half his time lookin’ for
her, and the rest of the time she’s lookin’ for him.”
Curley burst into the room excitedly. “Any you guys seen my
wife?” he demanded.
“She ain’t been here,” said Whit.
Curley looked threateningly about the room. “Where the hell’s
Slim?”
“Went out in the barn,” said George. “He was gonna put some
tar on a split hoof.”
Curley’s shoulders dropped and squared. “How long ago’d he
go?”
“Five—ten minutes.”
Curley jumped out the door and banged it after him.
Whit stood up. “I guess maybe I’d like to see this,” he said.
“Curley’s just spoilin’ or he wouldn’t start for Slim. An’ Curley’s
handy, God damn handy. Got in the finals for the Golden Gloves.
He got newspaper clippings about it.” He considered. “But jus’ the
same, he better leave Slim alone. Nobody don’t know what Slim
can do.”
“Thinks Slim’s with his wife, don’t he?” said George.
“Looks like it,” Whit said. “’Course Slim ain’t. Least I don’t
think Slim is. But I like to see the fuss if it comes off. Come on,
le’s go.”
George said, “I’m stayin’ right here. I don’t want to get mixed
up in nothing. Lennie and me got to make a stake.”
Carlson finished the cleaning of the gun and put it in the bag
and pushed the bag under his bunk. “I guess I’ll go out and look her
over,” he said. Old Candy lay still, and Lennie, from his bunk,
watched George cautiously.
When Whit and Carlson were gone and the door closed after
them, George turned to Lennie. “What you got on your mind?”
“I ain’t done nothing, George. Slim says I better not pet them
pups so much for a while. Slim says it ain’t good for them; so I
come right in. I been good, George.”
“I coulda told you that,” said George.
“Well, I wasn’t hurtin’ ’em none. I jus’ had mine in my lap
pettin’ it.”
George asked, “Did you see Slim out in the barn?”
“Sure I did. He tol’ me I better not pet that pup no more.”
“Did you see that girl?”
“You mean Curley’s girl?”
“Yeah. Did she come in the barn?”
“No. Anyways I never seen her.”
“You never seen Slim talkin’ to her?”
“Uh-uh. She ain’t been in the barn.”
“O.K.,” said George. “I guess them guys ain’t gonna see no
fight. If there’s any fightin’, Lennie, you keep out of it.”
“I don’t want no fights,” said Lennie. He got up from his bunk
and sat down at the table, across from George. Almost
automatically George shuffled the cards and laid out his solitaire
hand. He used a deliberate, thoughtful, slowness.
Lennie reached for a face card and studied it, then turned it
upside down and studied it. “Both ends the same,” he said.
“George, why is it both end’s the same?”
“I don’t know,” said George. “That’s jus’ the way they make
’em. What was Slim doin’ in the barn when you seen him?”
“Slim?”
“Sure. You seen him in the barn, an’ he tol’ you not to pet the
pups so much.”
“Oh, yeah. He had a can a’ tar an’ a paint brush. I don’t know
what for.”
“You sure that girl didn’t come in like she come in here today?”
“No. She never come.”
George sighed. “You give me a good whore house every time,”
he said. “A guy can go in an’ get drunk and get ever’thing outta his
system all at once, an’ no messes. And he knows how much it’s
gonna set him back. These here jail baits is just set on the trigger of
the hoosegow.”
Lennie followed his words admiringly, and moved his lips a
little to keep up. George continued, “You remember Andy
Cushman, Lennie? Went to grammar school?”
“The one that his old lady used to make hot cakes for the
kids?” Lennie asked.
“Yeah. That’s the one. You can remember anything if there’s
anything to eat in it.” George looked carefully at the solitaire hand.
He put an ace up on his scoring rack and piled a two, three and
four of diamonds on it. “Andy’s in San Quentin right now on
account of a tart,” said George.
Lennie drummed on the table with his fingers. “George?”
“Huh?”
“George, how long’s it gonna be till we get that little place an’
live on the fatta the lan’—an’ rabbits?”
“I don’ know,” said George. “We gotta get a big stake together.
I know a little place we can get cheap, but they ain’t givin’ it
away.”
Old Candy turned slowly over. His eyes were wide open. He
watched George carefully.
Lennie said, “Tell about that place, George.”
“I jus’ tol’ you, jus’ las’ night.”
“Go on—tell again, George.”
“Well, it’s ten acres,” said George. “Got a little win’mill. Got a
little shack on it, an’ a chicken run. Got a kitchen, orchard, cherries,
apples, peaches, ‘cots, nuts, got a few berries. They’s a place for
alfalfa and plenty water to flood it. They’s a pig pen——”
“An’ rabbits, George.”
“No place for rabbits now, but I could easy build a few hutches
and you could feed alfalfa to the rabbits.”
“Damn right, I could,” said Lennie. “You God damn right I
could.”
George’s hands stopped working with the cards. His voice was
growing warmer. “An’ we could have a few pigs. I could build a
smoke house like the one gran’pa had, an’ when we kill a pig we
can smoke the bacon and the hams, and make sausage an’ all like
that. An’ when the salmon run up river we could catch a hundred
of ’em an’ salt ’em down or smoke ’em. We could have them for
breakfast. They ain’t nothing so nice as smoked salmon. When the
fruit come in we could can it—and tomatoes, they’re easy to can.
Ever’ Sunday we’d kill a chicken or a rabbit. M aybe we’d have a
cow or a goat, and the cream is so God damn thick you got to cut it
with a knife and take it out with a spoon.”
Lennie watched him with wide eyes, and old Candy watched
him too. Lennie said softly, “We could live offa the fatta the lan’.”
“Sure,” said George. “All kin’s a vegetables in the garden, and if
we want a little whisky we can sell a few eggs or something, or
some milk. We’d jus’ live there. We’d belong there. There wouldn’t
be no more runnin’ round the country and gettin’ fed by a Jap
cook. No, sir, we’d have our own place where we belonged and not
sleep in no bunk house.”
“Tell about the house, George,” Lennie begged.
“Sure, we’d have a little house an’ a room to ourself. Little fat
iron stove, an’ in the winter we’d keep a fire goin’ in it. It ain’t
enough land so we’d have to work too hard. M aybe six, seven
hours a day. We wouldn’t have to buck no barley eleven hours a
day. An’ when we put in a crop, why, we’d be there to take the
crop up. We’d know what come of our planting.”
“An’ rabbits,” Lennie said eagerly. “An’ I’d take care of ’em.
Tell how I’d do that, George.”
“Sure, you’d go out in the alfalfa patch an’ you’d have a sack.
You’d fill up the sack and bring it in an’ put it in the rabbit cages.”
“They’d nibble an’ they’d nibble,” said Lennie, “the way they
do. I seen ’em.”
“Ever’ six weeks or so,” George continued, “them does would
throw a litter so we’d have plenty rabbits to eat an’ to sell. An’
we’d keep a few pigeons to go flyin’ around the win’mill like they
done when I was a kid.” He looked raptly at the wall over Lennie’s
head. “An’ it’d be our own, an’ nobody could can us. If we don’t
like a guy we can say, ‘Get the hell out,’ and by God he’s got to do
it. An’ if a fren’ come along, why we’d have an extra bunk, an’
we’d say, ‘Why don’t you spen’ the night?’ an’ by God he would.
We’d have a setter dog and a couple stripe cats, but you gotta
watch out them cats don’t get the little rabbits.”
Lennie breathed hard. “You jus’ let ’em try to get the rabbits.
I’ll break their God damn necks. I’ll…I’ll smash ’em with a stick.”
He subsided, grumbling to himself, threatening the future cats
which might dare to disturb the future rabbits.
George sat entranced with his own picture.
When Candy spoke they both jumped as though they had been
caught doing something reprehensible. Candy said, “You know
where’s a place like that?”
George was on guard immediately. “S’pose I do,” he said.
“What’s that to you?”
“You don’t need to tell me where it’s at. M ight be any place.”
“Sure,” said George. “That’s right. You couldn’t find it in a
hundred years.”
Candy went on excitedly, “How much they want for a place
like that?”
George watched him suspiciously. “Well—I could get it for six
hundred bucks. The ol’ people that owns it is flat bust an’ the ol’
lady needs an operation. Say—what’s it to you? You got nothing
to do with us.”
Candy said, “I ain’t much good with on’y one hand. I lost my
hand right here on this ranch. That’s why they give me a job
swampin’. An’ they give me two hunderd an’ fifty dollars ’Cause I
los’ my hand. An’ I got fifty more saved up right in the bank, right
now. Tha’s three hunderd, and I got fifty more comin’ the end a
the month. Tell you what——” He leaned forward eagerly.
“S’pose I went in with you guys. Tha’s three hunderd an’ fifty
bucks I’d put in. I ain’t much good, but I could cook and tend the
chickens and hoe the garden some. How’d that be?”
George half-closed his eyes. “I gotta think about that. We was
always gonna do it by ourselves.”
Candy interrupted him, “I’d make a will an’ leave my share to
you guys in case I kick off, ’Cause I ain’t got no relatives nor
nothing. You guys got any money? M aybe we could do her right
now?”
George spat on the floor disgustedly. “We got ten bucks
between us.” Then he said thoughtfully, “Look, if me an’ Lennie
work a month an’ don’t spen’ nothing, we’ll have a hunderd bucks.
That’d be four fifty. I bet we could swing her for that. Then you
an’ Lennie could go get her started an’ I’d get a job an’ make up the
res’, an’ you could sell eggs an’ stuff like that.”
They fell into a silence. They looked at one another, amazed.
This thing they had never really believed in was coming true.
George said reverently, “Jesus Christ! I bet we could swing her.”
His eyes were full of wonder. “I bet we could swing her,” he
repeated softly.
Candy sat on the edge of his bunk. He scratched the stump of
his wrist nervously. “I got hurt four years ago,” he said. “They’ll
can me purty soon. Jus’ as soon as I can’t swamp out no bunk
houses they’ll put me on the county. M aybe if I give you guys my
money, you’ll let me hoe in the garden even after I ain’t no good at
it. An’ I’ll wash dishes an’ little chicken stuff like that. But I’ll be
on our own place, an’ I’ll be let to work on our own place.” He
said miserably, “You seen what they done to my dog tonight?
They says he wasn’t no good to himself nor nobody else. When
they can me here I wisht somebody’d shoot me. But they won’t
do nothing like that. I won’t have no place to go, an’ I can’t get no
more jobs. I’ll have thirty dollars more comin’, time you guys is
ready to quit.”
George stood up. “We’ll do her,” he said. “We’ll fix up that
little old place an’ we’ll go live there.” He sat down again. They all
sat still, all bemused by the beauty of the thing, each mind was
popped into the future when this lovely thing should come about.
George said wonderingly, “S’pose they was a carnival or a
circus come to town, or a ball game, or any damn thing.” Old
Candy nodded in appreciation of the idea. “We’d just go to her,”
George said. “We wouldn’t ask nobody if we could. Jus’ say,
‘We’ll go to her,’ an’ we would. Jus’ milk the cow and sling some
grain to the chickens an’ go to her.”
“An’ put some grass to the rabbits,” Lennie broke in. “I
wouldn’t never forget to feed them. When we gon’ta do it,
George?”
“In one month. Right squack in one month. Know what I’m
gon’ta do? I’m gon’ta write to them old people that owns the place
that we’ll take it. An’ Candy’ll send a hunderd dollars to bind her.”
“Sure will,” said Candy. “They got a good stove there?”
“Sure, got a nice stove, burns coal or wood.”
“I’m gonna take my pup,” said Lennie. “I bet by Christ he
likes it there, by Jesus.”
Voices were approaching from outside. George said quickly,
“Don’t tell nobody about it. Jus’ us three an’ nobody else. They
li’ble to can us so we can’t make no stake. Jus’ go on like we was
gonna buck barley the rest of our lives, then all of a sudden some
day we’ll go get our pay an’ scram outta here.”
Lennie and Candy nodded, and they were grinning with delight.
“Don’t tell nobody,” Lennie said to himself.
Candy said, “George.”
“Huh?”
“I ought to of shot that dog myself, George. I shouldn’t ought
to of let no stranger shoot my dog.”
The door opened. Slim came in, followed by Curley and
Carlson and Whit. Slim’s hands were black with tar and he was
scowling. Curley hung close to his elbow.
Curley said, “Well, I didn’t mean nothing, Slim. I just ast you.”
Slim said, “Well, you been askin’ me too often. I’m gettin’ God
damn sick of it. If you can’t look after your own God damn wife,
what you expect me to do about it? You lay offa me.”
“I’m jus’ tryin’ to tell you I didn’t mean nothing,” said Curley.
“I jus’ thought you might of saw her.”
“Why’n’t you tell her to stay the hell home where she
belongs?” said Carlson. “You let her hang around bunk houses and
pretty soon you’re gonna have som’pin on your hands and you
won’t be able to do nothing about it.”
Curley whirled on Carlson. “You keep outta this les’ you
wanta step outside.”
Carlson laughed. “You God damn punk,” he said. “You tried to
throw a scare into Slim, an’ you couldn’t make it stick. Slim
throwed a scare inta you. You’re yella as a frog belly. I don’t care
if you’re the best welter in the country. You come for me, an’ I’ll
kick your God damn head off.”
Candy joined the attack with joy. “Glove fulla vaseline,” he
said disgustedly. Curley glared at him. His eyes slipped on past
and lighted on Lennie; and Lennie was still smiling with delight at
the memory of the ranch.
Curley stepped over to Lennie like a terrier. “What the hell you
laughin’ at?”
Lennie looked blankly at him. “Huh?”
Then Curley’s rage exploded. “Come on, ya big bastard. Get
up on your feet. No big son-of-a-bitch is gonna laugh at me. I’ll
show ya who’s yella.”
Lennie looked helplessly at George, and then he got up and
tried to retreat. Curley was balanced and poised. He slashed at
Lennie with his left, and then smashed down his nose with a right.
Lennie gave a cry of terror. Blood welled from his nose. “George,”
he cried. “M ake ‘um let me alone, George.” He backed until he was
against the wall, and Curley followed, slugging him in the face.
Lennie’s hands remained at his sides; he was too frightened to
defend himself.
George was on his feet yelling, “Get him, Lennie. Don’t let him
do it.”
Lennie covered his face with his huge paws and bleated with
terror. He cried, “M ake ‘um stop, George.” Then Curley attacked
his stomach and cut off his wind.
Slim jumped up. “The dirty little rat,” he cried, “I’ll get ‘um
myself.”
George put out his hand and grabbed Slim. “Wait a minute,” he
shouted. He cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Get
‘im, Lennie!”
Lennie took his hands away from his face and looked about for
George, and Curley slashed at his eyes. The big face was covered
with blood. George yelled again, “I said get him.”
Curley’s fist was swinging when Lennie reached for it. The
next minute Curley was flopping like a fish on a line, and his closed
fist was lost in Lennie’s big hand. George ran down the room.
“Leggo of him, Lennie. Let go.”
But Lennie watched in terror the flopping little man whom he
held. Blood ran down Lennie’s face, one of his eyes was cut and
closed. George slapped him in the face again and again, and still
Lennie held on to the closed fist. Curley was white and shrunken
by now, and his struggling had become weak. He stood crying, his
fist lost in Lennie’s paw.
George shouted over and over, “Leggo his hand, Lennie. Leggo.
Slim, come help me while the guy got any hand left.”
Suddenly Lennie let go his hold. He crouched cowering against
the wall. “You tol’ me to, George,” he said miserably.
Curley sat down on the floor, looking in wonder at his crushed
hand. Slim and Carlson bent over him. Then Slim straightened up
and regarded Lennie with horror. “We got to get him in to a
doctor,” he said. “Looks to me like ever’ bone in his han’ is bust.”
“I didn’t wanta,” Lennie cried. “I didn’t wanta hurt him.”
Slim said, “Carlson, you get the candy wagon hitched up. We’ll
take ‘um into Soledad an’ get ‘um fixed up.” Carlson hurried out.
Slim turned to the whimpering Lennie. “It ain’t your fault,” he
said. “This punk sure had it comin’ to him. But—Jesus! He ain’t
hardly got no han’ left.” Slim hurried out, and in a moment returned
with a tin cup of water. He held it to Curley’s lips.
George said, “Slim, will we get canned now? We need the stake.
Will Curley’s old man can us now?”
Slim smiled wryly. He knelt down beside Curley. “You got
your senses in hand enough to listen?” he asked. Curley nodded.
“Well, then listen,” Slim went on. “I think you got your han’
caught in a machine. If you don’t tell nobody what happened, we
ain’t going to. But you jus’ tell an’ try to get this guy canned and
we’ll tell ever’body, in’ then will you get the laugh.”
“I won’t tell,” said Curley. He avoided looking at Lennie.
Buggy wheels sounded outside. Slim helped Curley up. “Come
on now. Carlson’s gonna take you to a doctor.” He helped Curley
out the door. The sound of wheels drew away. In a moment Slim
came back into the bunk house. He looked at Lennie, still crouched
fearfully against the wall. “Le’s see your hands,” he asked.
Lennie stuck out his hands.
“Christ awmighty, I hate to have you mad at me,” Slim said.
George broke in, “Lennie was jus’ scairt,” he explained. “He
didn’t know what to do. I told you nobody ought never to fight
him. No, I guess it was Candy I told.”
Candy nodded solemnly. “That’s jus’ what you done,” he said.
“Right this morning when Curley first lit intil your fren’, you says.
‘He better not fool with Lennie if he knows what’s good for ‘um.’
That’s jus’ what you says to me.”
George turned to Lennie. “It ain’t your fault,” he said. “You
don’t need to be scairt no more. You done jus’ what I tol’ you to.
M aybe you better go in the wash room an’ clean up your face. You
look like hell.”
Lennie smiled with his bruised mouth. “I didn’t want no
trouble,” he said. He walked toward the door, but just before he
came to it, he turned back. “George?”
“What you want?”
“I can still tend the rabbits, George?”
“Sure. You ain’t done nothing wrong.”
“I di’n’t mean no harm, George.”
“Well, get the hell out and wash your face.”
Crooks, the negro stable buck, had his bunk in the harness room; a
little shed that leaned off the wall of the barn. On one side of the
little room there was a square four-paned window, and on the
other, a narrow plank door leading into the barn. Crooks’ bunk was
a long box filled with straw, on which his blankets were flung. On
the wall by the window there were pegs on which hung broken
harness in process of being mended; strips of new leather; and
under the window itself a little bench for leather-working tools,
curved knives and needles and balls of linen thread, and a small
hand riveter. On pegs were also pieces of harness, a split collar
with the horsehair stuffing sticking out, a broken hame, and a trace
chain with its leather covering split. Crooks had his apple box over
his bunk, and in it a range of medicine bottles, both for himself and
for the horses. There were cans of saddle soap and a drippy can of
tar with its paint brush sticking over the edge. And scattered about
the floor were a number of personal possessions; for, being alone,
Crooks could leave his things about, and being a stable buck and a
cripple, he was more permanent than the other men, and he had
accumulated more possessions than he could carry on his back.
Crooks possessed several pairs of shoes, a pair of rubber
boots, a big alarm clock and a single-barreled shotgun. And he had
books, too; a tattered dictionary and a mauled copy of the
California civil code for 1905. There were battered magazines and a
few dirty books on a special shelf over his bunk. A pair of large
gold-rimmed spectacles hung from a nail on the wall above his bed.
This room was swept and fairly neat, for Crooks was a proud,
aloof man. He kept his distance and demanded that other people
keep theirs. His body was bent over to the left by his crooked
spine, and his eyes lay deep in his head, and because of their depth
seemed to glitter with intensity. His lean face was lined with deep
black wrinkles, and he had thin, pain-tightened lips which were
lighter than his face.
It was Saturday night. Through the open door that led into the
barn came the sound of moving horses, of feet stirring, of teeth
champing on hay, of the rattle of halter chains. In the stable buck’s
room a small electric globe threw a meager yellow light.
Crooks sat on his bunk. His shirt was out of his jeans in back.
In one hand he held a bottle of liniment, and with the other he
rubbed his spine. Now and then he poured a few drops of the
liniment into his pink-palmed hand and reached up under his shirt
to rub again. He flexed his muscles against his back and shivered.
Noiselessly Lennie appeared in the open doorway and stood
there looking in, his big shoulders nearly filling the opening. For a
moment Crooks did not see him, but on raising his eyes he
stiffened and a scowl came on his face. His hand came out from
under his shirt.
Lennie smiled helplessly in an attempt to make friends.
Crooks said sharply, “You got no right to come in my room.
This here’s my room. Nobody got any right in here but me.”
Lennie gulped and his smile grew more fawning. “I ain’t doing
nothing,” he said. “Just come to look at my puppy. And I seen
your light,” he explained.
“Well, I got a right to have a light. You go on get outta my
room. I ain’t wanted in the bunk house, and you ain’t wanted in
my room.”
“Why ain’t you wanted?” Lennie asked.
“’Cause I’m black. They play cards in there, but I can’t play
because I’m black. They say I stink. Well, I tell you, you all of you
stink to me.”
Lennie flapped his big hands helplessly. “Ever’body went into
town,” he said. “Slim an’ George an’ ever’body. George says I
gotta stay here an’ not get in no trouble. I seen your light.”
“Well, what do you want?”
“Nothing—I seen your light. I thought I could jus’ come in an’
set.”
Crooks stared at Lennie, and he reached behind him and took
down the spectacles and adjusted them over his pink ears and
stared again. “I don’t know what you’re doin’ in the barn
anyway,” he complained. “You ain’t no skinner. They’s no call for
a bucker to come into the barn at all. You ain’t no skinner. You
ain’t got nothing to do with the horses.”
“The pup,” Lennie repeated. “I come to see my pup.”
“Well, go see your pup, then. Don’t come in a place where
you’re not wanted.”
Lennie lost his smile. He advanced a step into the room, then
remembered and backed to the door again. “I looked at ’em a little.
Slim says I ain’t to pet ’em very much.”
Crooks said, “Well, you been takin’ ’em out of the nest all the
time. I wonder the old lady don’t move ’em someplace else.”
“Oh, she don’t care. She lets me.” Lennie had moved into the
room again.
Crooks scowled, but Lennie’s disarming smile defeated him.
“Come on in and set a while,” Crooks said. “’Long as you won’t
get out and leave me alone, you might as well set down.” His tone
was a little more friendly. “All the boys gone into town, huh?”
“All but old Candy. He just sets in the bunk house sharpening
his pencil and sharpening and figuring.”
Crooks adjusted his glasses. “Figuring? What’s Candy figuring
about?”
Lennie almost shouted, “’Bout the rabbits.”
“You’re nuts,” said Crooks. “You’re crazy as a wedge. What
rabbits you talkin’ about?”
“The rabbits we’re gonna get, and I get to tend ’em, cut grass
an’ give ’em water, an’ like that.”
“Jus’ nuts,” said Crooks. “I don’t blame the guy you travel
with for keepin’ you outta sight.”
Lennie said quietly, “It ain’t no lie. We’re gonna do it. Gonna
get a little place an’ live on the fatta the lan’.”
Crooks settled himself more comfortably on his bunk. “Set
down,” he invited. “Set down on the nail keg.”
Lennie hunched down on the little barrel. “You think it’s a lie,”
Lennie said. “But it ain’t no lie. Ever’ word’s the truth, an’ you
can ast George.”
Crooks put his dark chin into his pink palm. “You travel
aroun’ with George, don’t ya?”
“Sure. M e an’ him goes ever’ place together.”
Crooks continued. “Sometimes he talks, and you don’t know
what the hell he’s talkin’ about. Ain’t that so?” He leaned forward,
boring Lennie with his deep eyes. “Ain’t that so?”
“Yeah…sometimes.”
“Jus’ talks on, an’ you don’t know what the hell it’s all
about?”
“Yeah…sometimes. But…not always.”
Crooks leaned forward over the edge of the bunk. “I ain’t a
southern negro,” he said. “I was born right here in California. M y
old man had a chicken ranch, ’bout ten acres. The white kids come
to play at our place, an’ sometimes I went to play with them, and
some of them was pretty nice. M y ol’ man didn’t like that. I never
knew till long later why he didn’t like that. But I know now.” He
hesitated, and when he spoke again his voice was softer. “There
wasn’t another colored family for miles around. And now there
ain’t a colored man on this ranch an’ there’s jus’ one family in
Soledad.” He laughed. “If I say something, why it’s just a nigger
sayin’ it.”
Lennie asked, “How long you think it’ll be before them pups
will be old enough to pet?”
Crooks laughed again. “A guy can talk to you an’ be sure you
won’t go blabbin’. Couple of weeks an’ them pups’ll be all right.
George knows what he’s about. Jus’ talks, an’ you don’t
understand nothing.” He leaned forward excitedly. “This is just a
nigger talkin’, an’ a busted-back nigger. So it don’t mean nothing,
see? You couldn’t remember it anyways. I seen it over an’ over—a
guy talkin’ to another guy and it don’t make no difference if he
don’t hear or understand. The thing is, they’re talkin’, or they’re
settin’ still not talkin’. It don’t make no difference, no difference.”
His excitement had increased until he pounded his knee with his
hand. “George can tell you screwy things, and it don’t matter. It’s
just the talking. It’s just bein’ with another guy. That’s all.” He
paused.
His voice grew soft and persuasive. “S’pose George don’t
come back no more. S’pose he took a powder and just ain’t coming
back. What’ll you do then?”
Lennie’s attention came gradually to what had been said.
“What?” he demanded.
“I said s’pose George went into town tonight and you never
heard of him no more.” Crooks pressed forward some kind of
private victory. “Just s’pose that,” he repeated.
“He won’t do it,” Lennie cried. “George wouldn’t do nothing
like that. I been with George a long time. He’ll come back tonight
——” But the doubt was too much for him. “Don’t you think he
will?”
Crooks’ face lighted with pleasure in his torture. “Nobody
can’t tell what a guy’ll do,” he observed calmly. “Le’s say he
wants to come back and can’t. S’pose he gets killed or hurt so he
can’t come back.”
Lennie struggled to understand. “George won’t do nothing like
that,” he repeated. “George is careful. He won’t get hurt. He ain’t
never been hurt, ’Cause he’s careful.”
“Well, s’pose, jus’ s’pose he don’t come back. What’ll you do
then?”
Lennie’s face wrinkled with apprehension. “I don’ know. Say,
what you doin’ anyways?” he cried. “This ain’t true. George ain’t
got hurt.”
Crooks bored in on him. “Want me ta tell ya what’ll happen?
They’ll take ya to the booby hatch. They’ll tie ya up with a collar,
like a dog.”
Suddenly Lennie’s eyes centered and grew quiet, and mad. He
stood up and walked dangerously toward Crooks. “Who hurt
George?” he demanded.
Crooks saw the danger as it approached him. He edged back on
his bunk to get out of the way. “I was just supposin’,” he said.
“George ain’t hurt. He’s all right. He’ll be back all right.”
Lennie stood over him. “What you supposin’ for? Ain’t
nobody goin’ to suppose no hurt to George.”
Crooks removed his glasses and wiped his eyes with his
fingers. “Jus’ set down,” he said. “George ain’t hurt.”
Lennie growled back to his seat on the nail keg. “Ain’t nobody
goin’ to talk no hurt to George,” he grumbled.
Crooks said gently, “M aybe you can see now. You got George.
You know he’s goin’ to come back. S’pose you didn’t have
nobody. S’pose you couldn’t go into the bunk house and play
rummy ’Cause you was black. How’d you like that? S’pose you
had to sit out here an’ read books. Sure you could play horseshoes
till it got dark, but then you got to read books. Books ain’t no
good. A guy needs somebody—to be near him.” He whined, “A
guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody. Don’t make no difference
who the guy is, long’s he’s with you. I tell ya,” he cried, “I tell ya
a guy gets too lonely an’ he gets sick.”
“George gonna come back,” Lennie reassured himself in a
frightened voice. “M aybe George come back already. M aybe I
better go see.”
Crooks said, “I didn’t mean to scare you. He’ll come back. I
was talkin’ about myself. A guy sets alone out here at night,
maybe readin’ books or thinkin’ or stuff like that. Sometimes he
gets thinkin’, an’ he got nothing to tell him what’s so an’ what
ain’t so. M aybe if he sees somethin’, he don’t know whether it’s
right or not. He can’t turn to some other guy and ast him if he sees
it too. He can’t tell. He got nothing to measure by. I seen things
out here. I wasn’t drunk. I don’t know if I was asleep. If some guy
was with me, he could tell me I was asleep, an’ then it would be all
right. But I jus’ don’t know.” Crooks was looking across the room
now, looking toward the window.
Lennie said miserably, “George wun’t go away and leave me. I
know George wun’t do that.”
The stable buck went on dreamily, “I remember when I was a
little kid on my old man’s chicken ranch. Had two brothers. They
was always near me, always there. Used to sleep right in the same
room, right in the same bed—all three. Had a strawberry patch.
Had an alfalfa patch. Used to turn the chickens out in the alfalfa on
a sunny morning. M y brothers’d set on a fence rail an’ watch ’em
—white chickens they was.”
Gradually Lennie’s interest came around to what was being
said. “George says we’re gonna have alfalfa for the rabbits.”
“What rabbits?”
“We’re gonna have rabbits an’ a berry patch.”
“You’re nuts.”
“We are too. You ast George.”
“You’re nuts.” Crooks was scornful. “I seen hunderds of men
come by on the road an’ on the ranches, with their bindles on their
back an’ that same damn thing in their heads. Hunderds of them.
They come, an’ they quit an’ go on; an’ every damn one of ’em’s
got a little piece of land in his head. An’ never a God damn one of
’em ever gets it. Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of
lan’. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven,
and nobody gets no land. It’s just in their head. They’re all the
time talkin’ about it, but it’s jus’ in their head.” He paused and
looked toward the open door, for the horses were moving
restlessly and the halter chains clinked. A horse whinnied. “I guess
somebody’s out there,” Crooks said. “M aybe Slim. Slim comes in
sometimes two, three times a night. Slim’s a real skinner. He looks
out for his team.” He pulled himself painfully upright and moved
toward the door. “That you, Slim?” he called.
Candy’s voice answered. “Slim went in town. Say, you seen
Lennie?”
“Ya mean the big guy?”
“Yeah. Seen him around any place?”
“He’s in here,” Crooks said shortly. He went back to his bunk
and lay down.
Candy stood in the doorway scratching his bald wrist and
looking blindly into the lighted room. He made no attempt to enter.
“Tell ya what, Lennie. I been figuring out about them rabbits.”
Crooks said irritably, “You can come in if you want.”
Candy seemed embarrassed. “I do’ know. ’Course, if ya want
me to.”
“Come on in. If ever’body’s comin’ in, you might just as well.”
It was difficult for Crooks to conceal his pleasure with anger.
Candy came in, but he was still embarrassed. “You got a nice
cozy little place in here,” he said to Crooks. “M ust be nice to have
a room all to yourself this way.”
“Sure,” said Crooks. “And a manure pile under the window.
Sure, it’s swell.”
Lennie broke in, “You said about them rabbits.”
Candy leaned against the wall beside the broken collar while he
scratched the wrist stump. “I been here a long time,” he said. “An’
Crooks been here a long time. This’s the first time I ever been in
his room.”
Crooks said darkly, “Guys don’t come into a colored man’s
room very much. Nobody been here but Slim. Slim an’ the boss.”
Candy quickly changed the subject. “Slim’s as good a skinner
as I ever seen.”
Lennie leaned toward the old swamper. “About them rabbits,”
he insisted.
Candy smiled. “I got it figured out. We can make some money
on them rabbits if we go about it right.”
“But I get to tend ’em,” Lennie broke in. “George says I get to
tend ’em. He promised.”
Crooks interrupted brutally. “You guys is just kiddin’
yourself. You’ll talk about it a hell of a lot, but you won’t get no
land. You’ll be a swamper here till they take you out in a box. Hell,
I seen too many guys. Lennie here’ll quit an’ be on the road in two,
three weeks. Seems like ever’ guy got land in his head.”
Candy rubbed his cheek angrily. “You God damn right we’re
gonna do it. George says we are. We got the money right now.”
“Yeah?” said Crooks. “An’ where’s George now? In town in a
whore house. That’s where your money’s goin’. Jesus, I seen it
happen too many times. I seen too many guys with land in their
head. They never get none under their hand.”
Candy cried, “Sure they all want it. Everybody wants a little
bit of land, not much. Jus’ som’thin’ that was his. Somethin’ he
could live on and there couldn’t nobody throw him off of it. I never
had none. I planted crops for damn near ever’body in this state,
but they wasn’t my crops, and when I harvested ’em, it wasn’t
none of my harvest. But we gonna do it now, and don’t make no
mistake about that. George ain’t got the money in town. That
money’s in the bank. M e an’ Lennie an’ George. We gonna have a
room to ourself. We’re gonna have a dog an’ rabbits an’ chickens.
We’re gonna have green corn an’ maybe a cow or a goat.” He
stopped, overwhelmed with his picture.
Crooks asked, “You say you got the money?”
“Damn right. We got most of it. Just a little bit more to get.
Have it all in one month. George got the land all picked out, too.”
Crooks reached around and explored his spine with his hand. “I
never seen a guy really do it,” he said. “I seen guys nearly crazy
with loneliness for land, but ever’ time a whore house or a
blackjack game took what it takes.” He hesitated. “…If you…guys
would want a hand to work for nothing—just his keep, why I’d
come an’ lend a hand. I ain’t so crippled I can’t work like a son-ofa-bitch if I want to.”
“Any you boys seen Curley?”
They swung their heads toward the door. Looking in was
Curley’s wife. Her face was heavily made up. Her lips were
slightly parted. She breathed strongly, as though she had been
running.
“Curley ain’t been here,” Candy said sourly.
She stood still in the doorway, smiling a little at them, rubbing
the nails of one hand with the thumb and forefinger of the other.
And her eyes traveled from one face to another. “They left all the
weak ones here,” she said finally. “Think I don’t know where they
all went? Even Curley. I know where they all went.”
Lennie watched her, fascinated; but Candy and Crooks were
scowling down away from her eyes. Candy said, “Then if you
know, why you want to ast us where Curley is at?”
She regarded them amusedly. “Funny thing,” she said. “If I
catch any one man, and he’s alone, I get along fine with him. But
just let two of the guys get together an’ you won’t talk. Jus’
nothing but mad.” She dropped her fingers and put her hands on
her hips. “You’re all scared of each other, that’s what. Ever’ one of
you’s scared the rest is goin’ to get something on you.”
After a pause Crooks said, “M aybe you better go along to
your own house now. We don’t want no trouble.”
“Well, I ain’t giving you no trouble. Think I don’t like to talk
to somebody ever’ once in a while? Think I like to stick in that
house alla time?”
Candy laid the stump of his wrist on his knee and rubbed it
gently with his hand. He said accusingly, “You gotta husban’. You
got no call foolin’ aroun’ with other guys, causin’ trouble.”
The girl flared up. “Sure I gotta husban’. You all seen him.
Swell guy, ain’t he? Spends all his time sayin’ what he’s gonna do
to guys he don’t like, and he don’t like nobody. Think I’m gonna
stay in that two-by-four house and listen how Curley’s gonna lead
with his left twict, and then bring in the ol’ right cross? ‘One-two’
he says. ‘Jus the ol’ one-two an’ he’ll go down.’” She paused and
her face lost its sullenness and grew interested. “Say—what
happened to Curley’s han’?”
There was an embarrassed silence. Candy stole a look at
Lennie. Then he coughed. “Why…Curley…he got his han’ caught
in a machine, ma’am. Bust his han’.”
She watched for a moment, and then she laughed. “Baloney!
What you think you’re sellin’ me? Curley started som’pin’ he
didn’ finish. Caught in a machine—baloney! Why, he ain’t give
nobody the good ol’ one-two since he got his han’ bust. Who bust
him?”
Candy repeated sullenly, “Got it caught in a machine.”
“Awright,” she said contemptuously. “Awright, cover ‘im up
if ya wanta. Whatta I care? You bindle bums think you’re so damn
good. Whatta ya think I am, a kid? I tell ya I could of went with
shows. Not jus’ one, neither. An’ a guy tol’ me he could put me in
pitchers….” She was breathless with indignation. “—Sat’iday
night. Ever’body out doin’ som’pin’. Ever’body! An’ what am I
doin’? Standin’ here talkin’ to a bunch of bindle stiffs—a nigger an’
a dum-dum and a lousy ol’ sheep—an’ likin’ it because they ain’t
nobody else.”
Lennie watched her, his mouth half open. Crooks had retired
into the terrible protective dignity of the negro. But a change came
over old Candy. He stood up suddenly and knocked his nail keg
over backward. “I had enough,” he said angrily. “You ain’t wanted
here. We told you you ain’t. An’ I tell ya, you got floozy idears
about what us guys amounts to. You ain’t got sense enough in that
chicken head to even see that we ain’t stiffs. S’pose you get us
canned. S’pose you do. You think we’ll hit the highway an’ look
for another lousy two-bit job like this. You don’t know that we got
our own ranch to go to, an’ our own house. We ain’t got to stay
here. We gotta house and chickens an’ fruit trees an’ a place a
hunderd time prettier than this. An’ we got fren’s, that’s what we
got. M aybe there was a time when we was scared of gettin’
canned, but we ain’t no more. We got our own lan’, and it’s ours,
an’ we c’n go to it.”
Curley’s wife laughed at him. “Baloney,” she said. “I seen too
many you guys. If you had two bits in the worl’, why you’d be in
gettin’ two shots of corn with it and suckin’ the bottom of the
glass. I know you guys.”
Candy’s face had grown redder and redder, but before she was
done speaking, he had control of himself. He was the master of the
situation. “I might of knew,” he said gently. “M aybe you just
better go along an’ roll your hoop. We ain’t got nothing to say to
you at all. We know what we got, and we don’t care whether you
know it or not. So maybe you better jus’ scatter along now, ’Cause
Curley maybe ain’t gonna like his wife out in the barn with us
‘bindle stiffs.’”
She looked from one face to another, and they were all closed
against her. And she looked longest at Lennie, until he dropped his
eyes in embarrassment. Suddenly she said, “Where’d you get them
bruises on your face?”
Lennie looked up guiltily. “Who—me?”
“Yeah, you.”
Lennie looked to Candy for help, and then he looked at his lap
again. “He got his han’ caught in a machine,” he said.
Curley’s wife laughed. “O.K., M achine. I’ll talk to you later. I
like machines.”
Candy broke in. “You let this guy alone. Don’t you do no
messing aroun’ with him. I’m gonna tell George what you says.
George won’t have you messin’ with Lennie.”
“Who’s George?” she asked. “The little guy you come with?”
Lennie smiled happily. “That’s him,” he said. “That’s the guy,
an’ he’s gonna let me tend the rabbits.”
“Well, if that’s all you want, I might get a couple rabbits
myself.”
Crooks stood up from his bunk and faced her. “I had enough,”
he said coldly. “You got no rights comin’ in a colored man’s room.
You got no rights messing around in here at all. Now you jus’ get
out, an’ get out quick. If you don’t, I’m gonna ast the boss not to
ever let you come in the barn no more.”
She turned on him in scorn. “Listen, Nigger,” she said. “You
know what I can do to you if you open your trap?”
Crooks stared hopelessly at her, and then he sat down on his
bunk and drew into himself.
She closed on him. “You know what I could do?”
Crooks seemed to grow smaller, and he pressed himself against
the wall. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, you keep your place then, Nigger. I could get you strung
up on a tree so easy it ain’t even funny.”
Crooks had reduced himself to nothing. There was no
personality, no ego—nothing to arouse either like or dislike. He
said, “Yes, ma’am,” and his voice was toneless.
For a moment she stood over him as though waiting for him to
move so that she could whip at him again; but Crooks sat perfectly
still, his eyes averted, everything that might be hurt drawn in. She
turned at last to the other two.
Old Candy was watching her, fascinated. “If you was to do
that, we’d tell,” he said quietly. “We’d tell about you framin’
Crooks.”
“Tell an’ be damned,” she cried. “Nobody’d listen to you, an’
you know it. Nobody’d listen to you.”
Candy subsided. “No…” he agreed. “Nobody’d listen to us.”
Lennie whined, “I wisht George was here. I wisht George was
here.”
Candy stepped over to him. “Don’t you worry none,” he said.
“I jus’ heard the guys comin’ in. George’ll be in the bunk house
right now, I bet.” He turned to Curley’s wife. “You better go home
now,” he said quietly. “If you go right now, we won’t tell Curley
you was here.”
She appraised him coolly. “I ain’t sure you heard nothing.”
“Better not take no chances,” he said. “If you ain’t sure, you
better take the safe way.”
She turned to Lennie. “I’m glad you bust up Curley a little bit.
He got it comin’ to him. Sometimes I’d like to bust him myself.”
She slipped out the door and disappeared into the dark barn. And
while she went through the barn, the halter chains rattled, and some
horses snorted and some stamped their feet.
Crooks seemed to come slowly out of the layers of protection
he had put on. “Was that the truth what you said about the guys
come back?” he asked.
“Sure. I heard ’em.”
“Well, I didn’t hear nothing.”
“The gate banged,” Candy said, and he went on, “Jesus Christ,
Curley’s wife can move quiet. I guess she had a lot of practice,
though.”
Crooks avoided the whole subject now. “M aybe you guys
better go,” he said. “I ain’t sure I want you in here no more. A
colored man got to have some rights even if he don’t like ’em.”
Candy said, “That bitch didn’t ought to of said that to you.”
“It wasn’t nothing,” Crooks said dully. “You guys comin’ in
an’ settin’ made me forget. What she says is true.”
The horses snorted out in the barn and the chains rang and a
voice called, “Lennie. Oh, Lennie. You in the barn?”
“It’s George,” Lennie cried. And he answered, “Here, George.
I’m right in here.”
In a second George stood framed in the door, and he looked
disapprovingly about. “What you doin’ in Crooks’ room. You
hadn’t ought to be in here.”
Crooks nodded. “I tol’ ’em, but they come in anyways.”
“Well, why’n’t you kick ’em out?”
“I di’n’t care much,” said Crooks. “Lennie’s a nice fella.”
Now Candy aroused himself. “Oh, George! I been figurin’ and
figurin’. I got it doped out how we can even make some money on
them rabbits.”
George scowled. “I thought I tol’ you not to tell nobody about
that.”
Candy was crestfallen. “Didn’t tell nobody but Crooks.”
George said, “Well you guys get outta here. Jesus, seems like I
can’t go away for a minute.”
Candy and Lennie stood up and went toward the door. Crooks
called, “Candy!”
“Huh?”
“’M ember what I said about hoein’ and doin’ odd jobs?”
“Yeah,” said Candy. “I remember.”
“Well, jus’ forget it,” said Crooks. “I didn’ mean it. Jus’
foolin’. I wouldn’ want to go no place like that.”
“Well, O.K., if you feel like that. Goodnight.”
The three men went out of the door. As they went through the
barn the horses snorted and the halter chains rattled.
Crooks sat on his bunk and looked at the door for a moment,
and then he reached for the liniment bottle. He pulled out his shirt
in back, poured a little liniment in his pink palm and, reaching
around, he fell slowly to rubbing his back.
One end of the great barn was piled high with new hay and over
the pile hung the four-taloned Jackson fork suspended from its
pulley. The hay came down like a mountain slope to the other end
of the barn, and there was a level place as yet unfilled with the new
crop. At the sides the feeding racks were visible, and between the
slats the heads of horses could be seen.
It was Sunday afternoon. The resting horses nibbled the
remaining wisps of hay, and they stamped their feet and they bit
the wood of the mangers and rattled the halter chains. The
afternoon sun sliced in through the cracks of the barn walls and lay
in bright lines on the hay. There was the buzz of flies in the air, the
lazy afternoon humming.
From outside came the clang of horseshoes on the playing peg
and the shouts of men, playing, encouraging, jeering. But in the
barn it was quiet and humming and lazy and warm.
Only Lennie was in the barn, and Lennie sat in the hay beside a
packing case under a manger in the end of the barn that had not
been filled with hay. Lennie sat in the hay and looked at a little
dead puppy that lay in front of him. Lennie looked at it for a long
time, and then he put out his huge hand and stroked it, stroked it
clear from one end to the other.
And Lennie said softly to the puppy, “Why do you got to get
killed? You ain’t so little as mice. I didn’t bounce you hard.” He
bent the pup’s head up and looked in its face, and he said to it,
“Now maybe George ain’t gonna let me tend no rabbits, if he fin’s
out you got killed.”
He scooped a little hollow and laid the puppy in it and covered
it over with hay, out of sight; but he continued to stare at the
mound he had made. He said, “This ain’t no bad thing like I got to
go hide in the brush. Oh! no. This ain’t. I’ll tell George I foun’ it
dead.”
He unburied the puppy and inspected it, and he stroked it from
ears to tail. He went on sorrowfully, “But he’ll know. George
always knows. He’ll say, ‘You done it. Don’t try to put nothing
over on me.’ An’ he’ll say, ‘Now jus’ for that you don’t get to
tend no rabbits!’”
Suddenly his anger arose. “God damn you,” he cried. “Why do
you got to get killed? You ain’t so little as mice.” He picked up the
pup and hurled it from him. He turned his back on it. He sat bent
over his knees and he whispered, “Now I won’t get to tend the
rabbits. Now he won’t let me.” He rocked himself back and forth in
his sorrow.
From outside came the clang of horseshoes on the iron stake,
and then a little chorus of cries. Lennie got up and brought the
puppy back and laid it on the hay and sat down. He stroked the
pup again. “You wasn’t big enough,” he said. “They tol’ me and
tol’ me you wasn’t. I di’n’t know you’d get killed so easy.” He
worked his fingers on the pup’s limp ear. “M aybe George won’t
care,” he said. “This here God damn little son-of-a-bitch wasn’t
nothing to George.”
Curley’s wife came around the end of the last stall. She came
very quietly, so that Lennie didn’t see her. She wore her bright
cotton dress and the mules with the red ostrich feathers. Her face
was made up and the little sausage curls were all in place. She was
quite near to him before Lennie looked up and saw her.
In a panic he shoveled hay over the puppy with his fingers. He
looked sullenly up at her.
She said, “What you got there, sonny boy?”
Lennie glared at her. “George says I ain’t to have nothing to do
with you—talk to you or nothing.”
She laughed. “George giving you orders about everything?”
Lennie looked down at the hay. “Says I can’t tend no rabbits if
I talk to you or anything.”
She said quietly, “He’s scared Curley’ll get mad. Well, Curley
got his arm in a sling—an’ if Curley gets tough, you can break his
other han’. You didn’t put nothing over on me about gettin’ it
caught in no machine.”
But Lennie was not to be drawn. “No, sir. I ain’t gonna talk to
you or nothing.”
She knelt in the hay beside him. “Listen,” she said. “All the
guys got a horseshoe tenement goin’ on. It’s on’y about four
o’clock. None of them guys is goin’ to leave that tenement. Why
can’t I talk to you? I never get to talk to nobody. I get awful
lonely.”
Lennie said, “Well, I ain’t supposed to talk to you or nothing.”
“I get lonely,” she said. “You can talk to people, but I can’t
talk to nobody but Curley. Else he gets mad. How’d you like not
to talk to anybody?”
Lennie said, “Well, I ain’t supposed to. George’s scared I’ll get
in trouble.”
She changed the subject. “What you got covered up there?”
Then all of Lennie’s woe came back on him. “Jus’ my pup,” he
said sadly. “Jus’ my little pup.” And he swept the hay from on
top of it.
“Why, he’s dead,” she cried.
“He was so little,” said Lennie. “I was jus’ playin’ with him…
an’ he made like he’s gonna bite me…an’ I made like I was gonna
smack him…an’…an’ I done it. An’ then he was dead.”
She consoled him. “Don’t you worry none. He was jus’ a mutt.
You can get another one easy. The whole country is fulla mutts.”
“It ain’t that so much,” Lennie explained miserably. “George
ain’t gonna let me tend no rabbits now.”
“Why don’t he?”
“Well, he said if I done any more bad things he ain’t gonna let
me tend the rabbits.”
She moved closer to him and she spoke soothingly. “Don’t you
worry about talkin’ to me. Listen to the guys yell out there. They
got four dollars bet in that tenement. None of them ain’t gonna
leave till it’s over.”
“If George sees me talkin’ to you he’ll give me hell,” Lennie
said cautiously. “He tol’ me so.”
Her face grew angry. “Wha’s the matter with me?” she cried.
“Ain’t I got a right to talk to nobody? Whatta they think I am,
anyways? You’re a nice guy. I don’t know why I can’t talk to you.
I ain’t doin’ no harm to you.”
“Well, George says you’ll get us in a mess.”
“Aw, nuts!” she said. “What kinda harm am I doin’ to you?
Seems like they ain’t none of them cares how I gotta live. I tell you
I ain’t used to livin’ like this. I coulda made somethin’ of myself.”
She said darkly, “M aybe I will yet.” And then her words tumbled
out in a passion of communication, as though she hurried before
her listener could be taken away. “I lived right in Salinas,” she said.
“Come there when I was a kid. Well, a show come through, an’ I
met one of the actors. He says I could go with that show. But my
ol’ lady wouldn’ let me. She says because I was on’y fifteen. But
the guy says I coulda. If I’d went, I wouldn’t be livin’ like this,
you bet.”
Lennie stroked the pup back and forth. “We gonna have a little
place—an’ rabbits,” he explained.
She went on with her story quickly, before she should be
interrupted. “’Nother time I met a guy, an’ he was in pitchers.
Went out to the Riverside Dance Palace with him. He says he was
gonna put me in the movies. Says I was a natural. Soon’s he got
back to Hollywood he was gonna write to me about it.” She looked
closely at Lennie to see whether she was impressing him. “I never
got that letter,” she said. “I always thought my ol’ lady stole it.
Well, I wasn’t gonna stay no place where I couldn’t get nowhere or
make something of myself, an’ where they stole your letters. I ast
her if she stole it, too, an’ she says no. So I married Curley. M et
him out to the Riverside Dance Palace that same night.” She
demanded, “You listenin’?”
“M e? Sure.”
“Well, I ain’t told this to nobody before. M aybe I ought’n to. I
don’ like Curley. He ain’t a nice fella.” And because she had
confided in him, she moved closer to Lennie and sat beside him.
“Coulda been in the movies, an’ had nice clothes—all them nice
clothes like they wear. An’ I coulda sat in them big hotels, an’ had
pitchers took of me. When they had them previews I coulda went
to them, an’ spoke in the radio, an’ it wouldn’ta cost me a cent
because I was in the pitcher. An’ all them nice clothes like they
wear. Because this guy says I was a natural.” She looked up at
Lennie, and she made a small grand gesture with her arm and hand
to show that she could act. The fingers trailed after her leading
wrist, and her little finger stuck out grandly from the rest.
Lennie sighed deeply. From outside came the clang of a
horseshoe on metal, and then a chorus of cheers. “Somebody made
a ringer,” said Curley’s wife.
Now the light was lifting as the sun went down, and the sun
streaks climbed up the wall and fell over the feeding racks and over
the heads of the horses.
Lennie said, “M aybe if I took this pup out and throwed him
away George wouldn’t never know. An’ then I could tend the
rabbits without no trouble.”
Curley’s wife said angrily, “Don’t you think of nothing but
rabbits?”
“We gonna have a little place,” Lennie explained patiently. “We
gonna have a house an’ a garden and a place for alfalfa, an’ that
alfalfa is for the rabbits, an’ I take a sack and get it all fulla alfalfa
and then I take it to the rabbits.”
She asked, “What makes you so nuts about rabbits?”
Lennie had to think carefully before he could come to a
conclusion. He moved cautiously close to her, until he was right
against her. “I like to pet nice things. Once at a fair I seen some of
them long-hair rabbits. An’ they was nice, you bet. Sometimes I’ve
even pet mice, but not when I could get nothing better.”
Curley’s wife moved away from him a little. “I think you’re
nuts,” she said.
“No I ain’t,” Lennie explained earnestly. “George says I ain’t. I
like to pet nice things with my fingers, sof’ things.”
She was a little bit reassured. “Well, who don’t?” she said.
“Ever’body likes that. I like to feel silk an’ velvet. Do you like to
feel velvet?”
Lennie chuckled with pleasure. “You bet, by God,” he cried
happily. “An’ I had some, too. A lady give me some, an’ that lady
was—my own Aunt Clara. She give it right to me—’bout this big a
piece. I wisht I had that velvet right now.” A frown came over his
face. “I lost it,” he said. “I ain’t seen it for a long time.”
Curley’s wife laughed at him. “You’re nuts,” she said. “But
you’re a kinda nice fella. Jus’ like a big baby. But a person can see
kinda what you mean. When I’m doin’ my hair sometimes I jus’
set an’ stroke it ’Cause it’s so soft.” To show how she did it, she
ran her fingers over the top of her head. “Some people got kinda
coarse hair,” she said complacently. “Take Curley. His hair is jus’
like wire. But mine is soft and fine. ’Course I brush it a lot. That
makes it fine. Here—feel right here.” She took Lennie’s hand and
put it on her head. “Feel right aroun’ there an’ see how soft it is.”
Lennie’s big fingers fell to stroking her hair.
“Don’t you muss it up,” she said.
Lennie said, “Oh! That’s nice,” and he stroked harder. “Oh,
that’s nice.”
“Look out, now, you’ll muss it.” And then she cried angrily,
“You stop it now, you’ll mess it all up.” She jerked her head
sideways, and Lennie’s fingers closed on her hair and hung on. “Let
go,” she cried. “You let go!”
Lennie was in a panic. His face was contorted. She screamed
then, and Lennie’s other hand closed over her mouth and nose.
“Please don’t,” he begged. “Oh! Please don’t do that. George’ll be
mad.”
She struggled violently under his hands. Her feet battered on
the hay and she writhed to be free; and from under Lennie’s hand
came a muffled screaming. Lennie began to cry with fright. “Oh!
Please don’t do none of that,” he begged. “George gonna say I done
a bad thing. He ain’t gonna let me tend no rabbits.” He moved his
hand a little and her hoarse cry came out. Then Lennie grew angry.
“Now don’t,” he said. “I don’t want you to yell. You gonna get me
in trouble jus’ like George says you will. Now don’t you do that.”
And she continued to struggle, and her eyes were wild with terror.
He shook her then, and he was angry with her. “Don’t you go
yellin’,” he said, and he shook her; and her body flopped like a
fish. And then she was still, for Lennie had broken her neck.
He looked down at her, and carefully he removed his hand from
over her mouth, and she lay still. “I don’t want ta hurt you,” he
said, “but George’ll be mad if you yell.” When she didn’t answer
nor move he bent closely over her. He lifted her arm and let it drop.
For a moment he seemed bewildered. And then he whispered in
fright, “I done a bad thing. I done another bad thing.”
He pawed up the hay until it partly covered her.
From outside the barn came a cry of men and the double clang
of shoes on metal. For the first time Lennie became conscious of
the outside. He crouched down in the hay and listened. “I done a
real bad thing,” he said. “I shouldn’t of did that. George’ll be mad.
An’…he said…an’ hide in the brush till he come. He’s gonna be
mad. In the brush till he come. Tha’s what he said.” Lennie went
back and looked at the dead girl. The puppy lay close to her.
Lennie picked it up. “I’ll throw him away,” he said. “It’s bad
enough like it is.” He put the pup under his coat, and he crept to
the barn wall and peered out between the cracks, toward the
horseshoe game. And then he crept around the end of the last
manger and disappeared.
The sun streaks were high on the wall by now, and the light
was growing soft in the barn. Curley’s wife lay on her back, and
she was half covered with hay.
It was very quiet in the barn, and the quiet of the afternoon
was on the ranch. Even the clang of the pitched shoes, even the
voices of the men in the game seemed to grow more quiet. The air
in the barn was dusky in advance of the outside day. A pigeon flew
in through the open hay door and circled and flew out again.
Around the last stall came a shepherd bitch, lean and long, with
heavy, hanging dugs. Halfway to the packing box where the
puppies were she caught the dead scent of Curley’s wife, and the
hair rose along her spine. She whimpered and cringed to the
packing box, and jumped in among the puppies.
Curley’s wife lay with a half-covering of yellow hay. And the
meanness and the plannings and the discontent and the ache for
attention were all gone from her face. She was very pretty and
simple, and her face was sweet and young. Now her rouged cheeks
and her reddened lips made her seem alive and sleeping very
lightly. The curls, tiny little sausages, were spread on the hay
behind her head, and her lips were parted.
As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and
remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and
movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.
Then gradually time awakened again and moved sluggishly on.
The horses stamped on the other side of the feeding racks and the
halter chains clinked. Outside, the mens’ voices became louder and
clearer.
From around the end of the last stall old Candy’s voice came.
“Lennie,” he called. “Oh, Lennie! You in here? I been figuring some
more. Tell you what we can do, Lennie.” Old Candy appeared
around the end of the last stall. “Oh, Lennie!” he called again; and
then he stopped, and his body stiffened. He rubbed his smooth
wrist on his white stubble whiskers. “I di’n’t know you was here,”
he said to Curley’s wife.
When she didn’t answer, he stepped nearer. “You oughten to
sleep out here,” he said disapprovingly; and then he was beside her
and—“Oh, Jesus Christ!” He looked about helplessly, and he
rubbed his beard. And then he jumped up and went quickly out of
the barn.
But the barn was alive now. The horses stamped and snorted,
and they chewed the straw of their bedding and they clashed the
chains of their halters. In a moment Candy came back, and George
was with him.
George said, “What was it you wanted to see me about?”
Candy pointed at Curley’s wife. George stared. “What’s the
matter with her?” he asked. He stepped closer, and then he echoed
Candy’s words. “Oh, Jesus Christ!” He was down on his knees
beside her. He put his hand over her heart. And finally, when he
stood up, slowly and stiffly, his face was as hard and tight as
wood, and his eyes were hard.
Candy said, “What done it?”
George looked coldly at him. “Ain’t you got any idear?” he
asked. And Candy was silent. “I should of knew,” George said
hopelessly. “I guess maybe way back in my head I did.”
Candy asked, “What we gonna do now, George? What we
gonna do now?”
George was a long time in answering. “Guess…we gotta tell
the…guys. I guess we gotta get ‘im an’ lock ‘im up. We can’t let
‘im get away. Why, the poor bastard’d starve.” And he tried to
reassure himself. “M aybe they’ll lock ‘im up an’ be nice to ‘im.”
But Candy said excitedly, “We oughtta let ‘im get away. You
don’t know that Curley. Curley gon’ta wanta get ‘im lynched.
Curley’ll get ‘im killed.”
George watched Candy’s lips. “Yeah,” he said at last, “that’s
right, Curley will. An’ the other guys will.” And he looked back at
Curley’s wife.
Now Candy spoke his greatest fear. “You an’ me can get that
little place, can’t we, George? You an’ me can go there an’ live nice,
can’t we, George? Can’t we?”
Before George answered, Candy dropped his head and looked
down at the hay. He knew.
George said softly, “—I think I knowed from the very first. I
think I knowed we’d never do her. He usta like to hear about it so
much I got to thinking maybe we would.”
“Then—it’s all off?” Candy asked sulkily.
George didn’t answer his question. George said, “I’ll work my
month an’ I’ll take my fifty bucks an’ I’ll stay all night in some
lousy cat house. Or I’ll set in some poolroom till ever’body goes
home. An’ then I’ll come back an’ work another month an’ I’ll
have fifty bucks more.”
Candy said, “He’s such a nice fella. I didn’ think he’d do
nothing like this.”
George still stared at Curley’s wife. “Lennie never done it in
meanness,” he said. “All the time he done bad things, but he never
done one of ’em mean.” He straightened up and looked back at
Candy. “Now listen. We gotta tell the guys. They got to bring him
in, I guess. They ain’t no way out. M aybe they won’t hurt ‘im.”
He said sharply, “I ain’t gonna let ’em hurt Lennie. Now you
listen. The guys might think I was in on it. I’m gonna go in the
bunk house. Then in a minute you come out and tell the guys about
her, and I’ll come along and make like I never seen her. Will you do
that? So the guys won’t think I was in on it?”
Candy said, “Sure, George. Sure I’ll do that.”
“O.K. Give me a couple minutes then, and you come runnin’
out an’ tell like you jus’ found her. I’m going now.” George turned
and went quickly out of the barn.
Old Candy watched him go. He looked helplessly back at
Curley’s wife, and gradually his sorrow and his anger grew into
words. “You God damn tramp,” he said viciously. “You done it,
di’n’t you? I s’pose you’re glad. Ever’body knowed you’d mess
things up. You wasn’t no good. You ain’t no good now, you lousy
tart.” He sniveled, and his voice shook. “I could of hoed in the
garden and washed dishes for them guys.” He paused, and then
went on in a singsong. And he repeated the old words: “If they
was a circus or a baseball game…we would of went to her…jus’
said ‘ta hell with work,’ an’ went to her. Never ast nobody’s say
so. An’ they’d of been a pig and chickens…an’ in the winter…the
little fat stove…an’ the rain comin’…an’ us jus’ settin’ there.” His
eyes blinded with tears and he turned and went weakly out of the
barn, and he rubbed his bristly whiskers with his wrist stump.
Outside the noise of the game stopped. There was a rise of
voices in question, a drum of running feet and the men burst into
the barn. Slim and Carlson and young Whit and Curley, and Crooks
keeping back out of attention range. Candy came after them, and
last of all came George. George had put on his blue denim coat and
buttoned it, and his black hat was pulled down low over his eyes.
The men raced around the last stall. Their eyes found Curley’s
wife in the gloom, they stopped and stood still and looked.
Then Slim went quietly over to her, and he felt her wrist. One
lean finger touched her cheek, and then his hand went under her
slightly twisted neck and his fingers explored her neck. When he
stood up the men crowded near and the spell was broken.
Curley came suddenly to life. “I know who done it,” he cried.
“That big son-of-a-bitch done it. I know he done it. Why—
ever’body else was out there playin’ horseshoes.” He worked
himself into a fury. “I’m gonna get him. I’m going for my shotgun.
I’ll kill the big son-of-a-bitch myself. I’ll shoot ‘im in the guts.
Come on, you guys.” He ran furiously out of the barn. Carlson
said, “I’ll get my Luger,” and he ran out too.
Slim turned quietly to George. “I guess Lennie done it, all
right,” he said. “Her neck’s bust. Lennie coulda did that.”
George didn’t answer, but he nodded slowly. His hat was so
far down on his forehead that his eyes were covered.
Slim went on, “M aybe like that time in Weed you was tellin’
about.”
Again George nodded.
Slim sighed. “Well, I guess we got to get him. Where you think
he might of went?”
It seemed to take George some time to free his words. “He—
would of went south,” he said. “We come from north so he would
of went south.”
“I guess we gotta get ‘im,” Slim repeated.
George stepped close. “Couldn’ we maybe bring him in an’
they’ll lock him up? He’s nuts, Slim. He never done this to be
mean.”
Slim nodded. “We might,” he said. “If we could keep Curley in,
we might. But Curley’s gonna want to shoot ‘im. Curley’s still
mad about his hand. An’ s’pose they lock him up an’ strap him
down and put him in a cage. That ain’t no good, George.”
“I know,” said George. “I know.”
Carlson came running in. “The bastard’s stole my Luger,” he
shouted. “It ain’t in my bag.” Curley followed him, and Curley
carried a shotgun in his good hand. Curley was cold now.
“All right, you guys,” he said. “The nigger’s got a shotgun. You
take it, Carlson. When you see ‘um, don’t give ‘im no chance.
Shoot for his guts. That’ll double ‘im over.”
Whit said excitedly, “I ain’t got a gun.”
Curley said, “You go in Soledad an’ get a cop. Get Al Wilts,
he’s deputy sheriff. Le’s go now.” He turned suspiciously on
George. “You’re comin’ with us, fella.”
“Yeah,” said George. “I’ll come. But listen, Curley. The poor
bastard’s nuts. Don’t shoot ‘im. He di’n’t know what he was
doin’.”
“Don’t shoot ‘im?” Curley cried. “He got Carlson’s Luger.
’Course we’ll shoot ‘im.”
George said weakly, “M aybe Carlson lost his gun.”
“I seen it this morning,” said Carlson. “No, it’s been took.”
Slim stood looking down at Curley’s wife. He said, “Curley—
maybe you better stay here with your wife.”
Curley’s face reddened. “I’m goin’,” he said. “I’m gonna shoot
the guts outta that big bastard myself, even if I only got one hand.
I’m gonna get ‘im.”
Slim turned to Candy. “You stay here with her then, Candy.
The rest of us better get goin’.”
They moved away. George stopped a moment beside Candy
and they both looked down at the dead girl until Curley called,
“You George! You stick with us so we don’t think you had nothin’
to do with this.”
George moved slowly after them, and his feet dragged heavily.
And when they were gone, Candy squatted down in the hay
and watched the face of Curley’s wife. “Poor bastard,” he said
softly.
The sound of the men grew fainter. The barn was darkening
gradually and, in their stalls, the horses shifted their feet and rattled
the halter chains. Old Candy lay down in the hay and covered his
eyes with his arm.
The deep green pool of the Salinas River was still in the late
afternoon. Already the sun had left the valley to go climbing up the
slopes of the Gabilan mountains, and the hilltops were rosy in the
sun. But by the pool among the mottled sycamores, a pleasant
shade had fallen.
A water snake glided smoothly up the pool, twisting its
periscope head from side to side; and it swam the length of the
pool and came to the legs of a motionless heron that stood in the
shallows. A silent head and beak lanced down and plucked it out
by the head, and the beak swallowed the little snake while its tail
waved frantically.
A far rush of wind sounded and a gust drove through the tops
of the trees like a wave. The sycamore leaves turned up their silver
sides, the brown, dry leaves on the ground scudded a few feet. And
row on row of tiny wind waves flowed up the pool’s green
surface.
As quickly as it had come, the wind died, and the clearing was
quiet again. The heron stood in the shallows, motionless and
waiting. Another little water snake swam up the pool, turning its
periscope head from side to side.
Suddenly Lennie appeared out of the brush, and he came as
silently as a creeping bear moves. The heron pounded the air with
its wings, jacked itself clear of the water and flew off down river.
The little snake slid in among the reeds at the pool’s side.
Lennie came quietly to the pool’s edge. He knelt down and
drank, barely touching his lips to the water. When a little bird
skittered over the dry leaves behind him, his head jerked up and he
strained toward the sound with eyes and ears until he saw the bird,
and then he dropped his head and drank again.
When he was finished, he sat down on the bank, with his side
to the pool, so that he could watch the trail’s entrance. He
embraced his knees and laid his chin down on his knees.
The light climbed on out of the valley, and as it went, the tops
of the mountains seemed to blaze with increasing brightness.
Lennie said softly, “I di’n’t forget, you bet, God damn. Hide in
the brush an’ wait for George.” He pulled his hat down low over
his eyes. “George gonna give me hell,” he said. “George gonna wish
he was alone an’ not have me botherin’ him.” He turned his head
and looked at the bright mountain tops. “I can go right off there an’
find a cave,” he said. And he continued sadly, “—an’ never have no
ketchup—but I won’t care. If George don’t want me…I’ll go
away. I’ll go away.”
And then from out of Lennie’s head there came a little fat old
woman. She wore thick bull’s-eye glasses and she wore a huge
gingham apron with pockets, and she was starched and clean. She
stood in front of Lennie and put her hands on her hips, and she
frowned disapprovingly at him.
And when she spoke, it was in Lennie’s voice. “I tol’ you an’
tol’ you,” she said. “I tol’ you, ‘M in’ George because he’s such a
nice fella an’ good to you.’ But you don’t never take no care. You
do bad things.”
And Lennie answered her, “I tried, Aunt Clara, ma’am. I tried
and tried. I couldn’ help it.”
“You never give a thought to George,” she went on in Lennie’s
voice. “He been doin’ nice things for you alla time. When he got a
piece a pie you always got half or more’n half. An’ if they was any
ketchup, why he’d give it all to you.”
“I know,” said Lennie miserably. “I tried, Aunt Clara, ma’am. I
tried and tried.”
She interrupted him. “All the time he coulda had such a good
time if it wasn’t for you. He woulda took his pay an’ raised hell in
a whore house, and he coulda set in a pool room an’ played
snooker. But he got to take care of you.”
Lennie moaned with grief. “I know, Aunt Clara, ma’am. I’ll go
right off in the hills an’ I’ll fin’ a cave an’ I’ll live there so I won’t
be no more trouble to George.”
“You jus’ say that,” she said sharply. “You’re always sayin’
that, an’ you know sonofabitching well you ain’t never gonna do it.
You’ll jus’ stick around an’ stew the b’Jesus outta George all the
time.”
Lennie said, “I might jus’ as well go away. George ain’t gonna
let me tend no rabbits now.”
Aunt Clara was gone, and from out of Lennie’s head there came
a gigantic rabbit. It sat on its haunches in front of him, and it
waggled its ears and crinkled its nose at him. And it spoke in
Lennie’s voice too.
“Tend rabbits,” it said scornfully. “You crazy bastard. You
ain’t fit to lick the boots of no rabbit. You’d forget ’em and let ’em
go hungry. That’s what you’d do. An’ then what would George
think?”
“I would not forget,” Lennie said loudly.
“The hell you wouldn’,” said the rabbit. “You ain’t worth a
greased jack-pin to ram you into hell. Christ knows George done
ever’thing he could to jack you outta the sewer, but it don’t do no
good. If you think George gonna let you tend rabbits, you’re even
crazier’n usual. He ain’t. He’s gonna beat hell outta you with a
stick, that’s what he’s gonna do.”
Now Lennie retorted belligerently, “He ain’t neither. George
won’t do nothing like that. I’ve knew George since—I forget when
—and he ain’t never raised his han’ to me with a stick. He’s nice to
me. He ain’t gonna be mean.”
“Well he’s sick of you,” said the rabbit. “He’s gonna beat hell
outta you an’ then go away an’ leave you.”
“He won’t,” Lennie cried frantically. “He won’t do nothing like
that. I know George. M e an’ him travels together.”
But the rabbit repeated softly over and over, “He gonna leave
you, ya crazy bastard. He gonna leave ya all alone. He gonna leave
ya, crazy bastard.”
Lennie put his hands over his ears. “He ain’t, I tell ya he ain’t.”
And he cried, “Oh! George—George—George!”
George came quietly out of the brush and the rabbit scuttled
back into Lennie’s brain.
George said quietly, “What the hell you yellin’ about?”
Lennie got up on his knees. “You ain’t gonna leave me, are ya,
George? I know you ain’t.”
George came stiffly near and sat down beside him. “No.”
“I knowed it,” Lennie cried. “You ain’t that kind.”
George was silent.
Lennie said, “George.”
“Yeah?”
“I done another bad thing.”
“It don’t make no difference,” George said, and he fell silent
again.
Only the topmost ridges were in the sun now. The shadow in
the valley was blue and soft. From the distance came the sound of
men shouting to one another. George turned his head and listened
to the shouts.
Lennie said, “George.”
“Yeah?”
“Ain’t you gonna give me hell?”
“Give ya hell?”
“Sure, like you always done before. Like, ‘If I di’n’t have you
I’d take my fifty bucks——’”
“Jesus Christ, Lennie! You can’t remember nothing that
happens, but you remember ever’ word I say.”
“Well, ain’t you gonna say it?”
George shook himself. He said woodenly, “If I was alone I
could live so easy.” His voice was monotonous, had no emphasis.
“I could get a job an’ not have no mess.” He stopped.
“Go on,” said Lennie. “An’ when the enda the month come
——”
“An’ when the end of the month come I could take my fifty
bucks an’ go to a…cat house…” He stopped again.
Lennie looked eagerly at him. “Go on, George. Ain’t you gonna
give me no more hell?”
“No,” said George.
“Well, I can go away,” said Lennie. “I’ll go right off in the hills
an’ find a cave if you don’ want me.”
George shook himself again. “No,” he said. “I want you to stay
with me here.”
Lennie said craftily—“Tell me like you done before.”
“Tell you what?”
“’Bout the other guys an’ about us.”
George said, “Guys like us got no fambly. They make a little
stake an’ then they blow it in. They ain’t got nobody in the worl’
that gives a hoot in hell about ’em——”
“But not us,” Lennie cried happily. “Tell about us now.”
George was quiet for a moment. “But not us,” he said.
“Because——”
“Because I got you an’——”
“An’ I got you. We got each other, that’s what, that gives a
hoot in hell about us,” Lennie cried in triumph.
The little evening breeze blew over the clearing and the leaves
rustled and the wind waves flowed up the green pool. And the
shouts of men sounded again, this time much closer than before.
George took off his hat. He said shakily, “Take off your hat,
Lennie. The air feels fine.”
Lennie removed his hat dutifully and laid it on the ground in
front of him. The shadow in the valley was bluer, and the evening
came fast. On the wind the sound of crashing in the brush came to
them.
Lennie said, “Tell how it’s gonna be.”
George had been listening to the distant sounds. For a moment
he was business-like. “Look acrost the river, Lennie, an’ I’ll tell
you so you can almost see it.”
Lennie turned his head and looked off across the pool and up
the darkening slopes of the Gabilans. “We gonna get a little place,”
George began. He reached in his side pocket and brought out
Carlson’s Luger; he snapped off the safety, and the hand and gun
lay on the ground behind Lennie’s back. He looked at the back of
Lennie’s head, at the place where the spine and skull were joined.
A man’s voice called from up the river, and another man
answered.
“Go on,” said Lennie.
George raised the gun and his hand shook, and he dropped his
hand to the ground again.
“Go on,” said Lennie. “How’s it gonna be. We gonna get a little
place.”
“We’ll have a cow,” said George. “An’ we’ll have maybe a pig
an’ chickens…an’ down the flat we’ll have a…little piece alfalfa
——”
“For the rabbits,” Lennie shouted.
“For the rabbits,” George repeated.
“And I get to tend the rabbits.”
“An’ you get to tend the rabbits.”
Lennie giggled with happiness. “An’ live on the fatta the lan’.”
“Yes.”
Lennie turned his head.
“No, Lennie. Look down there acrost the river, like you can
almost see the place.”
Lennie obeyed him. George looked down at the gun.
There were crashing footsteps in the brush now. George turned
and looked toward them.
“Go on, George. When we gonna do it?”
“Gonna do it soon.”
“M e an’ you.”
“You…an’ me. Ever’body gonna be nice to you. Ain’t gonna
be no more trouble. Nobody gonna hurt nobody nor steal from
’em.”
Lennie said, “I thought you was mad at me, George.”
“No,” said George. “No, Lennie. I ain’t mad. I never been mad,
an’ I ain’t now. That’s a thing I want ya to know.”
The voices came close now. George raised the gun and listened
to the voices.
Lennie begged, “Le’s do it now. Le’s get that place now.”
“Sure, right now. I gotta. We gotta.”
And George raised the gun and steadied it, and he brought the
muzzle of it close to the back of Lennie’s head. The hand shook
violently, but his face set and his hand steadied. He pulled the
trigger. The crash of the shot rolled up the hills and rolled down
again. Lennie jarred, and then settled slowly forward to the sand,
and he lay without quivering.
George shivered and looked at the gun, and then he threw it
from him, back up on the bank, near the pile of old ashes.
The brush seemed filled with cries and with the sound of
running feet. Slim’s voice shouted, “George. Where you at,
George?”
But George sat stiffly on the bank and looked at his right hand
that had thrown the gun away. The group burst into the clearing,
and Curley was ahead. He saw Lennie lying on the sand. “Got him,
by God.” He went over and looked down at Lennie, and then he
looked back at George. “Right in the back of the head,” he said
softly.
Slim came directly to George and sat down beside him, sat very
close to him. “Never you mind,” said Slim. “A guy got to
sometimes.”
But Carlson was standing over George. “How’d you do it?” he
asked.
“I just done it,” George said tiredly.
“Did he have my gun?”
“Yeah. He had your gun.”
“An’ you got it away from him and you took it an’ you killed
him?”
“Yeah. Tha’s how.” George’s voice was almost a whisper. He
looked steadily at his right hand that had held the gun.
Slim twitched George’s elbow. “Come on, George. M e an’
you’ll go in an’ get a drink.”
George let himself be helped to his feet. “Yeah, a drink.”
Slim said, “You hadda, George. I swear you hadda. Come on
with me.” He led George into the entrance of the trail and up
toward the highway.
Curley and Carlson looked after them. And Carlson said, “Now
what the hell ya suppose is eatin’ them two guys?”